Roy Exum
There was a story in Monday’s newspaper informing us that the Catoosa County (Ga.) schools have just ordered that a book called “The Burn Journals” be removed from its libraries. This was obviously done in a sadly misguided effort to keep children from setting themselves on fire, as the author once did when he doused himself with gasoline at the age of 14 and tried to commit suicide.
I hate censorship, in just about any form or fashion, but I am not stupid enough to believe today’s generation of children are stupid enough to set themselves on fire. To my knowledge, not one person in Catoosa County, since the Indians of long ago to the good people of present, have ever done that on purpose.
If you read the book, which describes Brent Runyon’s harrowing ordeal and his climb back after doing the dumbest thing in his life, it leaves literally every reader with a very good idea that suicide is a very bad idea.
That is what is called “education,” and it is far better representation of what “really happens” than what the same children rent at the video store. An “at-risk” child can watch TV on any given night and find some wonderful ways to get in trouble.
But if we can get a book in their hands like Runyon’s that explains how tough it is to trudge back, to endure the skin graphs and all that follows “a very bad idea,” I take the view nobody who reads it will do the same thing.
A great part of the book is the writer’s anguish over returning to high school, not just because the other students would see the hideous scars but because they would immediately label him as such a loser. You don’t think a 15-year-old can grasp that?
I fully realize there are some books “unsuitable” for young children. I also know that the minute a child gets Internet savvy he or she is one word-search away from reading or seeing just about anything they please. Therefore, for a school system to even think it can ban books like “Slaughterhouse Five” or “Best Short Stories by Negro Writers” is absolutely ridiculous.
I’ve said before that “Huckleberry Finn” was one of my earliest role models, but it was “N***** Jim” who was my idol, the one who I desperately wanted as my friend. Back when I read it, “Negro” wasn’t a bad word and while today it is quite unacceptable, part of my education has been to comprehend why “the ‘N’ word” should never again be used in our society but also why, once upon a time, life was really like that.
So when I still read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or languish over the fact today’s children have never been able to meet my most beloved “Uncle Remus,” or know why the tar baby ever messed around with the briar patch, or Little Black Sambo’s recipe for making butter for the pancakes, my disdain for censorship grows even greater.
The movie “Saving Private Ryan” opens with the most horrific footage I have ever seen. I still have trouble watching it. But after I watched it for the first time, I immediately sought out men who were actually at Normandy and each told me that yes, it was every bit that bad and, in some of their eyes, even worse.
Thus “educated,” I was left with such an emotional gratitude that I took my son, who was in college at the time, to northern France, and we spent several days driving around the site of the D-Day invasion. When we visited the American cemetery and found that literally no visitor to this day ever talks above a whisper, we both cried. When we learned that the beautiful grass between the markers is still only cut by mowers made in America, we cried again.
Don’t you see, that is “education.” You don’t stifle “education” by banning books, you encourage it by reading them and then making up your own mind and setting your own sail.
My dream is that one day every child who graduates from high school will have to spend 30 hours during his or her junior/senior year as an “observer” in a General Sessions Court. I wish every kid would have to spend one night as an “observer” in a busy emergency room.
I wish anyone with 10 or more detentions would be required to ride around with a police officer one night to see what bad guys do once they get out of school. C’mon, they watch “CSI-Miami” on TV, let’s do a revealing tour of the city morgue. Show them what a corpse looks like after it has been hit with a .45 caliber slug. When a kid can smell the morgue and touch that cold and lifeless skin, that’s “education.”
You cringe at the very notion no 16-year-old should watch as doctors feverishly try to stop the bleeding of some drunk who has just had his leg ripped off, this in a car crash where two others were killed. I say that’s exactly what they ought to see before they even think about driving drunk. This is real “education.”
You believe that a teen-aged girl shouldn’t watch as a mother is told her son has just been blown away in a gang fight. I say the lesson is much more vivid in real life than it is at the movie theater, where they’ve already seen such but never comprehended it. Trust me, I’ve seen stuff you wouldn’t believe in my life. It has been a brilliant “education.”
There are some kids who have never been to a church, a mosque, or the public library. Nobody minds field trips to those places. But why is it we are pushing the envelope when we take them to a homeless shelter at 9 o’clock at night and let them see guys huddled beneath one thin blanket?
Why not let our high school juniors, maybe kids who are flirting with drugs, see a severely handicapped child at Orange Grove who is out of control, mucus streaming down his face, and watch what it takes to settle that child. Heart-wrenching, you darn right, but it is so very real that it happens every day. That’s “education.”
Back to books. I’ve read all kinds of books and still gobble them up like jelly beans. When I was a real little kid, my dad encouraged me to read anything in the house, and, I don’t know where I found it, but all of a sudden, I was asking what a “eunuch” was. I may have been about six at the time.
Dad explained those were guys who lived inside the palace and tended to the beautiful queen and her princesses. But, in order to do that, he said they paid a pretty big price. I remember very clearly that I didn’t care how good looking the queen was, or how ornate the palace was, I learned that day the biggest reason I was never going to be a eunuch. “They cut off what! I ain’t getting in that line!”
It’s the same thing; if a 14-year-old boy in Catoosa County wants to read about another 14-year-old boy who doused himself with gasoline and then endured the agony that accompanied it, I think that is marvelous. If a kid is contemplating suicide, first make sure he has access to whatever he needs to know that it is, without doubt, the most selfish and senseless act a human can commit on this earth.
“Education” is reading George Orwell, Martin Luther King, the Bible’s book of Job, Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampt,” the Muslim’s Koran, and the newest rage, “The Shack.” The list is virtually endless. Let them read anything because, when they are finished, they’ll have a far better grasp on their wonder.
There is another new book – just out - called “The Kindly Ones.” It is about a German SS officer that is so violent, so sickening, that it is probably pornographic. A high school kid can easily order it from Amazon and learn a huge reason why our nation was among those that took part in D-Day and, at great sacrifice, marched all the way to Berlin.
By reading such a book as “The Kindly Ones,” far more nauseating than “The Burn Journals” by any standard, the education factor is brought home with the force of a sledge hammer. And that, cousin, is the best imaginable form of “education.”
Listen, you take a kid who is dumb enough to bring a shiny gun to school, and take him to the morgue where they will show him real close what an angry bullet can do, you’ve taught a greater class than he’ll ever remember in chemistry lab.
Let him get a big nose of the smell that “CSI-Miami” cannot provide, and then ask the toughie to reach out and feel the dead, cold skin on that body that was once somebody’s son, some girl’s brother, and it is better than any book in the world.
Outside of that, let those who condemn “The Burn Journals” read it from start to finish, and they’ll be the first to urge it remain in the library because, in fact, it tells pretty specifically what happens in the weeks and months after you set yourself on fire. No kid in the world would ever want to experience such misery.
That’s when it becomes the best “education” imaginable.
royexum@aol.com