A friend recently declared that, because “millions are flooding across our southern border without the (liberal) government lifting a finger,” anyone who votes liberal is an enemy of the state. Obviously, the argument goes, Biden’s immigration policy will destroy the US.

In part, he’s right. In 2022, roughly 2 million immigrants crossed the US border. That represents about .6% of the US population and amounts to ~5,000 people a day.

How many people can we handle?

Sure, immigration doubled from 2021, but there is no flood, and the government is most certainly not standing by as these people simply traipse into our country. In addition, emigration numbers are usually higher than those for immigration.

Re US destruction by immigration, that’s a theory at best.

If it was true, I could understand my friend’s frustration, and nobody could accuse him of hate speech.

If he were to instead read a few articles in defense of current US border policy, written by qualified, PhD-level analysts, and/or consider the current humanitarian crisis driving the surge, or spend 15 minutes studying how CBP actually processes legal border crossings, he might still disagree with current policy, but I’ll argue that he’d be less inclined to post hate speech.

It would certainly dial his fear down a bit.

In my lifetime, America has never been this divided. But it’s not a spirit of division that’s ripping us apart, it’s ignorance, which usually leads to fear, then isolation, then hatred. Hatred then leads to an even greater rebellion against the need to consider someone else’s viewpoint, or hop on the internet for 15 minutes to read a dissenting opinion.

Why would you read an immigration article penned by an enemy of the state?

Now, to add to our ignorance, and our fear, and our division, we’re banning books like never before, further isolating us from thoughts that don’t think like we do.

I’m not completely opposed to book banning. I don’t want my kids reading anything published by the KKK, or the “God Hates Fags” church, or anything else that justifies someone’s phobic fantasies. There are subjects that none of us want in our school/public libraries, or in public discourse.

Some ideas do nothing but harm and should be stifled.

At the same time I think everyone should read something like Mein Kampf; nothing warns us of the dark potential of humanity like the words of Adolf Hitler.

But should we ban 6 Dr. Seuss books? or Of Mice and Men. Huckleberry Finn? These are some of the titles that liberal folks would like to ban.

No Asian child should read a kid’s book that depicts a chopstick-wielding Asian person with yellow skin and slanted eyes, or Africans that look more like apes than humans. Those are offensive in a way that I-the-white-guy could never understand. I’m not complaining that Dr. Seuss Enterprises no longer publishes these books.

But banning them is problematic. Do I then have to ban the stop-motion vintage Christmas movie where one of the Wise Men has slanted eyes and a thick Chinese accent voiced by no person from China? Or the movie Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi apes an equally thick Japanese accent?

And if I cancel Dr. Seuss, do I have a right to complain about any other book ban?

Regardless, none of this compares to the unprecedented level of book banning that’s happening in places like Texas and Florida.

In our current predicament, we’re banning alot more than a relative handful of  books – in far more than a handful of school districts. Most of these go after works about systemic racism, white priviledge, Critical Race Theory, and any and all Transgender and Queer issues; all anathema to the people who want to ban any further discussion.

Bad as this is, you have to chuckle a bit. As soon as teenagers find out that a book has been banned from their school library, they’ll head straight to the internet to figure out how to get a copy. Given the internet, book banning is simply going to make banned books more popular.

Either way, this level of book banning transcends our typical level of concern for what we think should be publicly available. This is simply the next step in a level of national division that, in recent years, has spun out of control. We started with the election of a leader who called for physical violence during his campaign rallies, and was caught on video celebrating the many virtues of sexual assault. Once elected, he employed political hate speech and conspiracy theories like no politician in my lifetime.

Its no wonder that, under the Trump administration, America suffered its worst case of national division in a hundred years.

Now, book banning.

The Next Chapter

There are three realities about our country that guarantee more.

First, the world’s not going to get less Gay, or Trans, much as anti-Gay Christianity hopes it will. Deviations from mainstream gender/sexual thought are going to continue. The condemnation and villification that comes from God’s army will only grease the wheels, as will its book-banning offspring.

Second, America is not going to stop talking about racial injustice until racial injustice goes away. Likewise, folks who believe that there are no significant racial justice problems will continue to dig in their heels, seeing these initiatives as a threat to America.

The objective data that support things like CRT will continue to be ignored because the people who publish them are alleged enemies of the state. Their perspective should therefore be banned.

And so, isolating ourselves from the other side of the truth, we refuse to study anything that doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, and things that are helpful will continue to look like evil in our eyes.

A few years ago, I heard the proposition that “Mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow,” and thought it was ridiculous. Up to that point, I had always been fairly conservative when it came to racial justice issues, i.e., we’ve come so far, done so much for the Black community, yet they just seem to want more. They should be happy with what they have, thankful to live in a country that cares about them.

But The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was written by a really smart person, respected and read by many of my friends, including my wife. I read it, then went on a fact check odyssey, poring over arrest and incarcertation data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 6 months.

I came out with a new perspective.

There are rules to understanding what is true and what is false. Deeply considering both sides of the story is one of them.

Book banning is the opposite, a deviation from the truth that far outstrips Transgenderism’s deviation from mainstream gender thought.

Sadly, there’s more to come.

Please don’t hear me saying that it’s wrong to be conservative. It is wrong, however, to live on conservative island – or liberal island for that matter – refusing to eat anything but the junk food Cheetos that our favorite talking heads are always waving in front of our angry, frightened faces.

We’re better than this, but I fear that we might not be bigger than this.

 

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash