In this overwhelming heat and humidity of a South Carolina summer, I was reminded of a winter tradition. A Christmas tradition, in fact. I have been reading Snow Falling on Cedars every Christmas Eve since I was seventeen years old. I first read the book as an assignment in my honors English class when I was a junior at my public high school on Long Island in 2002. I instantly fell in love with it. The words, the characters, the vision, the story, the themes. It became an instant classic for me, a comfort read, and a staple in my library and life. On some of my worst nights over the years, I have put on the audiobook and been able to find sleep in an uneasy world of trauma and pain through the comforting lull and familiarity of David Guterson’s words.
As South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver continues her dystopian-style purge of basic educational tenets in this state, she has taken another step in her "Handmaid’s Tale-ian" effort and helped enact one of the strictest book bans in the country. A book ban that is vague, wildly unnecessary, discriminatory, and horrifically infuriating. A book ban that would have stolen my favorite book from me and taken away the years of comfort it brought me, particularly in the immediate aftermath of my father’s death. She has stolen stories, life lessons, representation, comfort, and magic from thousands of students across our state and replaced it with a militaristic adherence to - and a woeful attempt at - limiting the minds, imaginations, and possibilities of children in hopes of keeping them sheltered enough to live in the dull reality of Weaver’s own desire.
But the reality is, book bans will not do what Weaver hopes they will do. Why? Because, unlike decades past, routinely unfettered access to the internet allows children and teens to bypass adults like Weaver. Regardless of the strictest parental controls, children and teens are watching videos, reading articles, listening to music, looking at photos, and reading texts and stories about topics that make the sex scenes in Snow Falling on Cedars seem like an episode of Sesame Street (though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure people like Weaver also think Sesame Street is "woke," but I digress).
“Not my child!,” you shout defiantly. Ha! Keep dreaming. Talk to any teacher or any person who works with kids or teens in any capacity, and you’ll quickly come to realize your kids know more about “hard” topics than we ever did at their age. And they don’t need a library card to gain that knowledge. Children who seek out books to understand the experiences they’re going through, to find characters who look, sound, talk, worry, eat, feel, live, and hope as they do in order to feel a connection they might not otherwise have in their own lives, should not be shunned or shamed. They should be encouraged, and they should be given every opportunity to find their story, not have it written and determined, or worse, banned, by a woman who has never even met them.
People like Weaver live in an alternate universe where they forget what it was like to be a child or a teenager. They forget that regardless of what generation we grew up in, we all learned about the things we “weren’t” supposed to learn about, regardless of how difficult the adults in the room made it to gain that information. From TV, magazines, MTV, our older siblings, our best friends, AOL chat rooms, our parents' bathroom drawers, the mall, the Victoria Secret catalog, sleepovers, Pay-Per-View, premium cable, Britney Spears, the feminine hygiene aisle at CVS, and yes, books. And this generation, and the ones that come after it, will be no different than the ones before them, who always found ways to skirt the rules and learn the truth about the world, which, yes, included topics like periods and “third base," divorce and self-identity, suicide and drug use, parental neglect and abuse by trusted adults, bullying and birth control, first loves and first kisses, training bras and racism, weight-shame and heartbreak, losing faith and questioning our beliefs, homelessness and eating disorders, and the deaths of our beloved pets and terminal diseases we watched our favorite grandparents die from.
And what Weaver, who quite frankly has no business being involved in the education of a sea turtle, let alone a person, decidedly chooses to double down on is this idea that ignoring these stories and sticking her head in the sand and forcing others to do so as well will somehow magically change the fact that children experience them every single day in some way, shape, or form. Giving children and teenagers a source of comfort, reflection, and relatability through books does not encourage that reality; it simply acknowledges its undeniable existence, and by that very definition, acknowledges their existence.
I was having sex well before I ever picked up the book Snow Falling on Cedars. It did not teach me anything I didn’t already know about the topic. It simply further encouraged my love of reading and writing, the beauty of words, and the ability to feel a connection between black and white lines on a page. It gave me hope and made me see humanity where I had never thought to see it before. It opened up new perspectives and allowed me to put myself in the shoes of someone I was not and did not know at the time. It is a book I will cherish until I die. It literally changed the course of my life in so many positive ways. And if Ellen Weaver had her way some twenty years ago in my hometown in New York, she would have gleefully stolen that book and all the joys it has brought me from me and not even thought twice about doing so.
Weaver has stolen so much from our state and its children. But unlike Ellen Weaver, I believe in their ability to not only overcome her ignorance, fear, and complete lack of humanity and empathy, but to thrive in spite of it. Unlike Ellen Weaver, I believe in our children’s ability to learn, process, understand, grow, experience, and navigate life, including the parts that she pretends do not exist. But the only way children can do so is if their lives, their experiences, their hopes, dreams, fears, traumas, and imaginations are acknowledged, supported, explored, and valued. Book bans do the complete opposite of that. Limiting children is not educating them; it’s indoctrinating them. And that is exactly what Weaver wants to do, because the more children know, the more likely they are to turn away from Weaver’s myopic and limited world full of small ideas and unrealistic expectations. That is what people like Weaver fear the most — not sex scenes or dirty words, but people being educated and realizing people like her are nothing more than power-hungry con-artists who can only thrive in a world where knowledge is severely limited and information is strictly guarded. I am grateful every day that I did not grow up in a world like that.
To every child who has had their story stolen by Ellen Weaver, I am so sorry, but I promise, those stories are more powerful and stronger than any of the fear Weaver and those like her propagate. Books have always endured, and they will endure this woman’s attempt at destroying them. She can ban books, but she absolutely cannot ban the hope and joy books of all kinds have brought to billions of men, women, and children all over the world for eons. She’d know this if she ever took the time to actually read one.
