The easy way

(6/2024) There are different ways of looking at any issue. You can think through a problem and choices of solutions, or take the path of least resistance. The easy way often has unintended consequences.

Spring is the season of rebirth. All creatures increase their activity, including bees and wasps (hornets, yellow jackets). When a honeybee colony’s numbers grow too large for their hive, they make a new queen. The old queen leaves, taking half of the colony with her, to look for a new home. Sometimes they find a new home in the walls of a human family’s house. Honeybee colonies can get settled in before any humans take notice. Once they do, the choices are to A - call someone to relocate the hive by cutting it out of the wall and repairing the drywall, B - Call an exterminator to poison them, or C - the easy way of grabbing a can of Raid.

First identify the problem. Are the critters flying in and out of a house bees or wasps? For wasps, an exterminator or spray is a good call—nobody wants a wasp nest nearby. For bees, are they honeybees? Most bees aren’t really a problem, or aggressive. Honeybees are not aggressive unless threatened.

The easy way of spraying poison on honeybees presents a couple of problems. Spraying the outside of a building doesn’t kill the bees inside. If all bees are killed, the honey left in the hive attracts bees from other hives. Foraging bees take honey back to their hive, killing the bees there. The unintended consequence of spraying insecticide on honeybees, is killing bees within a radius of up to 2 miles.

Humans love the path of least resistance when they can get away with it. Book banning is an easy way for people to claim they stand on a moral high ground of concern about threats to our social order. It’s a way that some candidates for the FCPS Board of Education frame their goals. Safety for the children. Safe from what? Ideas?

Are we to believe that the people who shout the loudest about keeping children safe can’t have a conversation with their own children? Understanding the lives and perspectives of other people builds a stronger community. Knowing that there are people around you who have different beliefs and customs doesn’t change a thing about how free you are to live your own life. That is the real American Dream.

If we have fellow Americans who have experienced historical, generational trauma from slavery, then had institutionalized rules applied to them that are not applied to others, and they are strong enough to relive it to talk about it, then the children of any group are strong enough to learn about it.

Learning about wrongs done to another person is not the same as being accused of crimes against humanity. Refusing to listen to the experiences of others simply means you don’t care.

History happens to each of us. Each of our fellow Americans may have a story that does not fit neatly with yours or mine. Writing and reading about history allows each of us, including our children, to learn about other perspectives. We may or may not agree on what these perspectives and individual opinions mean. We don’t have to. What we have to do, to rightfully claim to be a civilized society, is to NOT stop people from telling their own story.

The argument for banning books is often based in a religious reasoning. Book bans are frequently focused on topics of sexual orientation, sexual identity, expression, etc. It could reasonably be argued that to ban a book by any one of God‘s human creations is blasphemous, and disrespectful of your creator. We are all creatures of the same earth, from the same origin. We do not have the right to say, which of God‘s creations is good or bad. We do have the right to say we will or won’t interact with somebody for some personal reason. But taking the easy way of trying to remove things we don’t like about other people, is to teach our children that they can easily throw away people they don’t like. In turn, it is a subtle lesson that any of us can be thrown away. This can lead to the unintended (I hope) consequence of erasing our fellow human beings.

On the positive side, other consequences of book banning threats include increased sales of banned books, discussion of banned books, and more attention on discrimination and bullying of students. Recent assessment of dozens of books available in Frederick county public schools produced one book removal due to being age inappropriate. It also produced a really great list of books to read.

We have a system of public libraries that does not interfere with one’s choice of reading material. There are fellow Americans, running for elected office, who would make every effort to change our access to freedom of thought, of sharing thoughts. In some states librarians have become the target. Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have passed laws that include fines and jail time for librarians who allow access to books deemed inappropriate for minors. Florida passed state laws banning discussions of certain topics. If you do not want your rights to speak and think freely to disappear into a massive pile of "legal" documentation, then vote for people who respect our Constitution.

Policies and laws such as book banning are unintended consequences of not voting. It is the duty of each of us to choose our leaders wisely. We have the whole summer to read books, and learn about the candidates in the upcoming election. Hopefully, we will elect leaders whose goal is to protect everyone’s freedom to find their own path.

2024 is the year of the vote. Please make yours count.