While I'm on the subject of rudeness, do you want to know who else is rude? People who want to ban books from schools and stores, that's who. My mom got my nephew the first three Harry Potter books for Christmas. While she was standing in line for something entirely different at Walmart, the woman in front of her was letting the clerk have it for Walmart selling such sinful books at Christmas. My mom said that the woman was going on and on about how horrible the books were because, according to this woman, they promoted devil worship and were Satan's instruments. She said that Walmart needed to stop stocking the books and only carry good, wholesome Christian books.My mom tries to avoid public confrontations so, of course, she bit her tongue and failed to divulge that she had just bought the same sinful books for her grandson. I would like to think that, had I been standing in line with her, I would have said something, if not to the lady, who was preaching the evils of J.K. Rowling, then to the poor clerk who was being blamed for Walmart policies. After all, Harry Potter is just a book. It's a story like any other, meant to entertain and engage the mind, not corrupt it. Why can't people just take it for what it is?
I'd be willing to bet that the woman had no more read the book or seen the movie than she had jumped over the moon or swum the Panama Canal. I asked my mom, "Are you sure it wasn't S.T.?" (Names have been initialized to protect the preachy.) S.T. was a friend of mine's mother who got Christina's Ghost, that Judy Blume-esque book about the girl who befriends a ghost at her uncle's mansion one summer, banned from the city middle school back in my home town. She used the same spiel to get the ban. According to S.T., the book promoted Satanism because it featured a ghost as a main character; thus, young, impressionable children shouldn't be allowed to read it. The school board bought the argument, despite the fact that the middle school in question was a public school and that the Constitution guarantees a separation of church and state. But, hey, who cares about the Constitution anyway? Surely not some small town that's more interested in keeping it's somebodies happy than letting the nobodies read what they want to read.
I don't know if this woman in Walmart was a somebody or not. If she was, it's altogether possible that, in the upcoming months, that particular Walmart will have less children's books than it had before. You'll probably never be able to find The DaVinci Code or any other Dan Brown book there either.
The whole thing is ridiculous, if you ask me. Shouldn't these people just be happy that kids are reading and not playing video games or standing in the middle of the street screaming like the kids in my neighborhood? If they don't want their kids to read those books, if they truly believe that a fictional child wizard or ghost is an instrument of Satan, then they shouldn't let their kids read those books. It's their choice as parents, but they shouldn't have the right to make that decision for every other parent and reader out there. Believe it or not, some of us, whether we're eight or eighty-eight, know how to differentiate fact from fiction and the written word from the reality that's right in front of us.
Now I'm off to read my own sinful book, James Patterson's Cross County. I'm sure like all the other Alex Cross books, it's packed full of murder and several of the seven deadly sins. Wow, I wonder if it will corrupt my own impressionable mind and turn me into a Satan-worshipping serial killer. I'm sure S.T. and the Walmart woman would think so. Maybe if they read a little more and preached a little less, they'd realize how stupid that assumption would be.
