A Sensible Precaution

 As well as I can remember, I’ve never read a book by Dr. Seuss as a kid, parent, or grandparent.  So I will not miss his recently banned books and will not be paying the hundreds of dollars that used copies of them are being offered at online. However I would miss Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Romeo and Juliet, Tamburlaine the Great, Blazing Saddles, The Searchers, Madame Butterfly, Don Giovanni, and many other things our present day legions of decency and listers of prohibited books might decide to ban next.

It is a problem with an obvious solution. One should not trust any streaming service, corporate vendor, library, or broadcasters to keep something available once the cancelling gang goes after it.  Instead, a person should have his own copies of the books, movies, and music he likes in his physical possession completely independent of and separate from any other party’s storage, devices, or offerings. (Antique stores and independent book, music, and video sellers are good places to shop and often staffed by people interesting to talk to.) The cancellers may be able to remove a book from Amazon’s or the public library’s shelves, but they cannot touch yours, at least not in this country and not yet.  

That may seem excessive. It certainly can be expensive and take up a lot of space, but  it is a sensible precaution. Foolish, unreasoning, barbarous minded, dogmatic fanatics will try to do foolish, irrational, barbarous, fanatical things.  Given the present political climate in the country and the general level of cowardice in corporations and institutions, the cancellers will often get their way. One cannot tell what they will next decide is problematic or when enough people finally will come to their senses and tell them to go to hell that it will not matter.