There’s a weird feeling that washes over me when the community my newspaper serves is name-checked — unfavorably — in the national media.
It hasn’t happened very often. There was that time a county sheriff got caught “seeding” a field prior to a dove hunt that was also a campaign event. Oh, wait … that was a nine-day wonder, but it didn’t make the state or national news.
Then there was a train wreck involving a train carrying Astros fans that killed a couple of kids. Huh. That one didn’t break through the noise, either.
Oh, and let’s not forget …
Come to think of it, it hasn’t happened very often at all, if ever.
Indeed, it has happened more frequently and with more histrionics during my relatively brief tenure at the Hill Country News than at any time in my 30-plus year career.
(Y’all remember my repeated admonition that this stuff ain’t normal? It’s not, but it appears that some of you have forgotten. PLEASE STOP making our communities look like it’s full of bigots. I’m semi-retired and too old for this stuff!)
National name-checking is even worse when one of the people doing that name-check is a favorite author. That’s happened twice, now. At least twice. I may have missed one or two.
This time, thankfully, it’s not a handful of rogue city council members trying to leverage support for divisive and controversial issues into some sort of distasteful regional or national notoriety. It’s not, but it seems like some of the same attitudes that launched Cedar Park and Leander into the spotlight a couple of years back are still around.
No. This time, one of my favorite authors has the Leander school district in her cross hairs.
I stumbled across an open letter that was sent to Leander trustees about the book club reading list.
The letter took trustees to task for removing some books it deemed too controversial for high schoolers to read.
Here’s an excerpt: “We are particularly alarmed and disappointed to see that so many of these targeted books feature authors or characters who are women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, or people of color … [and] are deeply concerned that this entire episode risks sending a dangerous message to students: that the best way to confront ideas or literature with which one disagrees is to prohibit or silence it, rather than finding other, constructive ways to engage with it. ”
The first name on the very long list of authors who signed this letter was Margret Atwood, author of the brilliant dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Separately, another author, Carmen Maria Machado, who wrote “In the Dream House, published a column in the New York Times. She noted that “… preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living.”
It was her work that prompted a woman to brandish garishly colored sex toys at Leander ISD trustees.
Now, I am painfully aware that this issue continues to ricochet across social media and that shines a rather harsh light on our community’s bigotry and hatefulness. Our most recent story about this has spawned more than 400 comments, many of them using language I would never use in front of my mother.
I am also aware that the simple act of bringing this up will expose me and this newspaper to more hateful rhetoric. But, this discussion isn’t useful if we continue to yell past each other rather than talking to each other.
All of my kids are readers. All of them read pretty much whatever they pleased — mostly age-appropriate stuff but also books that pushed their personal boundaries and challenged their worldview. We were thrilled to see them reading fiction, for pleasure.
I don’t really have a point, but I do have two observations, and they are these:
• My mother-in-law, a life-long public school teacher, warned that challenging the creativity of teenagers is a foolish and dangerous obsession (a spider tattooed across the face of a child in defiance of a school dress code was part of the conversation).
• A good friend, who is involved in politics at the state level, routinely warns us to be very careful what we say, and the way you say it, on social media. Potential businesses pay close attention to that stuff. Often, the intelligence gleaned from these posts is used to determine whether or not to make expensive investments in a community. Ready bigotry and hate will send investors scrambling.
Finally, here’s another quote from Machado’s NYT piece: “They want to shield their children from anything that suggests a world beyond their narrow perception. As anyone can tell you — as history can tell you — this is ultimately a fool’s errand.”
This commentary was first published in the Hill Country News.
The Ragged Edge 