Words & Time
How hard can it be…put together some words overlaid on a coherent thought and, voila, a sentence. Rinse. Repeat. Paragraph!! See! I’m already halfway there! Writing them down…that should be the easiest part! But it’s not and in the writing process, time is not my friend; if I don’t immediately write down what I am thinking, poof, the thought goes back into the ether. Ironically, many of my more coherent thoughts come to me in the middle of the night, in the dark, no papers or pens. That could be God’s way of critiquing me. Smile.
Many words have a way of sticking around…books, digital, stone, all seem to have found a way to “beat” time. Moses, Shakespeare, Plato, Spenser, Whitman, Woolf, and on and on and on, still live in our libraries, our “Audible” files, our streaming services, etc. As many people as there are, there are that many ideas, as many ideas as there are, there are that many books. And books have been the target of opposing ideas for millennia. Not surprising, however, is that the art of book burning got its real start in Germany, on May 10, 1933, about 90 years ago.
On May 10, the Nazis began burning books written by people that were not in the image of a pure Nazi; the pure Nazi had a certain cultural and ideological core, everything that was written about or by someone outside of that core was burned. Everything. Goebbels said, “The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts.” And the flames in the ovens, but he didn’t say that at first. The process was fictionalized in Ray Bradbury’s novel and later movie, “Fahrenheit 451.” I say fictionalized but in real life that’s happening right now, almost like the movie.
In parts of America today, the state governments and school boards are doing the equivalent of book burning. They’ve started with the school libraries, public libraries are probably next, and then will come the bookstores. And they are doing it for the same reason as the Nazis, “if you don’t look like me,” then you will not be allowed to read about people who look like you.
America was built on diversity. Not always peaceful or kind diversity, but diversity nonetheless. Now we deny it. Now we erect barriers. We can’t agree on books, time zones, of borders much less agreeing to care for one another. Maybe that’s the real reason all of my writing thoughts come to me in the middle of the night; I shouldn’t let my writing see the light of day or they will come for me, too.