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I turned thirty-three earlier this year and despite the fact that most people think I’m more like forty-three if not ninety-three, I am taking advantage of this my dominical year to begin a sort of public ministry that may end in my crucifixion and death. Please don’t mistake my meaning, I have no delusions of Messianic grandeur, but I nevertheless suspect that I have at least thirty-three (if not ninety-three) things to say that are unlikely to be met with enthusiasm and so, I figure — fuck it — let’s dance around the third rail and see what happens.
As the country continues to roil over cockamamy controversies in public schooling over what material can be taught and what books may be read; enacting countless prohibitions and protests of the same, I have a few thoughts. I read recently that Oklahoma’s Secretary of Education has called for a high school teacher to lose her certification for providing a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library, which offers digital library cards to students 13 – 21 anywhere in the United States.
I am constitutionally in the deepest, darkest, rawest depths of my soul opposed to censorship, thought-policing, or anything smacking of an Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In fact, I probably ended up a good American Protestant precisely because I adopted the last edition of the index as a required reading list at fifteen. Which is a thing you would entirely expect if you knew literally anything about adolescents.
But, and here’s the thing, I’m also a parent and I have been blessed with well-behaved, well-adjusted, overall good kids, by nearly any measure or definition of the same, and I have not and would not restrict them reading any of the 5,000ish books on the premises if they asked. I’d be more worried about handling brittle bindings than what content they might be exposed to.
They’ve been saturated in books since I read to them in utero. And no one of any ideological bent, left or right, could convince me that mere access to an idea is a problem. Ideas can’t actually be controlled and that’s what people fear most, I think. They desperately want control, but neither children, their porosity, their exposures; nor ideas, their proliferation, their persuasiveness can actually be boxed up and put away. In fact, the very act of prohibition all but guarantees pursuit of the prohibited.
It flies in the face of literally everything we observe about children, not to mention basic human psychology, and yet we still try to assert our petty little tyrannies wherever we may get away with it, however ultimately counterproductive.
So, I admit, I have been radically honest and open about the world and its peoples from the outset. I’ve never once in my entire time as a parent deliberately chosen a book because it was “developmentally appropriate” or refused or waffled over a question because it was hard.
Children’s books can be very enjoyable, but I’d just as soon read Christina Rossetti to them as Dr Seuss. I read poems, short stories, and novels indiscriminately when they were young and I don’t regret it. If anything, I avoided realistic novels not because they might have “adult situations” but because they’re generally as dull as dirt and plod along like, well, real life. Terrible way to encourage a love of literature in anyone but the already stricken. Handily, they’re a tremendously late innovation and generally overrated.
See, as the Poet Terence put it, I am a human being, and thus nothing human is alien to me. Neither is it alien to my children, because they’re human beings, too, whole and entire. They’re not partial, they’re not subhuman. I have never prevented them from hearing or asking about anything common and recurrent among human beings, however difficult, and that includes the peculiar bugbears of those on the right and on the left.
If they ask a question, I answer it. I never simplify, I never bowlderize, I never euphemize, and I never have. I don’t give them the conclusion I wish they would form as if it were fact, but I explain the varieties of opinions drawn on subjects and why, specifically, I hold one or another. I have not withheld from them that the world is full of folly and cruelty and stupidity, vicious smallmindedness and rapacious self-interest and, yes, even openmindedness so broad it’s entirely emptied its head and niceness so naïve it exacerbates the harm it wishes to relieve.
The only things I varnish in this life are furniture, because wood is dead cells not living ones and is therefore fragile rather than anti-fragile.
So, yes, rather than let them learn about sexuality from misinformed classmates with older, equally misinformed siblings or from stumbling upon some sordid corner of the internet, I just explained it all casually, upfront, at an early age. And had to explain it more than once, because there is no once and done in learning. And, yes, because they have known gay and lesbian people their entire lives that included same-sex relationships, which are clearly not procreative and don’t fit into the tidy “how are babies made” explanation. Children are not idiots, we’re condescending infantilizers with control complexes. There’s a difference. They know you’re not telling them something and they wonder why and they will fall down rabbitholes to find out.
Unlike their parents, they’ve also never not lived in a community full of people with the full spectrum of skin tones. They’ve never known a world where people aren’t just all mixed up together. But again, they’re not idiots. They wonder why more of the kids that look like them do better in school and don’t get into fights. They can see with their own eyes that most of the homeless aren’t pink people and they wonder why? I have to answer those questions or try. They can either read it in a book or they can hear about it on the street, either way, there’s no concealing the reality that we have continually voted into power people who have ensured that the cumulative effects of slavery, segregation, red-lining, and cultural hostility to black and brown people continues to this day.
I do not subscribe to the “appropriate” and “inappropriate” school of subject matter for children or so-called polite conversation more generally. There are merely subjects and there is the capacity to understand those subjects fully or partially. Many adults show less facility with them than children do. So, to answer the question posed to me the other day “When are you writing your parenting book?” I’m not, because parenting books are universally terrible. And I really do not believe that any degree of anxious striving to parent well actually works. It’s like food, the more you think about the diet over a certain basic threshold the poorer the dietary outcomes. Instead, I’ll set myself apart as the pariah: If they want to read it, they’re welcome to try. I am who I am today because the library was a place without limits beyond my own literacy, which improved only through exposure to things beyond its powers.
Whether it’s Ayn Rand’s wooden heroes, scarcely credible villains, or harshly categorical thinking or something like James Baldwin’s ‘Another Country,’ with its emotional ferocity and haunting carnality, be my guest, read away. And if a librarian or a school teacher ever declines a request for a book, I have a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library and/or a debit card. Because let us be honest, adults are the ones who are uncomfortable, we’re the ones anxious and traumatized by ideas, projecting our own discomfort on our children until finally they project it back. We’re the ones clutching the apron strings for dear life trying to preserve an innocence we confected for a world that has never existed.
If you want to have some influence over your children, what little you can have, model for them values that have tangible outcomes, don’t lie to them about the true shape of things, encourage them to be creative and critical, and just don’t be a puritanical hypocrite who equates coercion with love and prohibition with learning.
It has been my experience, that the more that is freely given and dutifully taught, the less these perennially anxiety-inducing subjects assert their thrall. I could list the bevy of taboos about which I have been honest, so that my children are versed in them well enough that they don’t fixate upon them, they’re not entirely undone by the very thought of humanity’s most intractable and multivalent characters and conditions, but I suspect it would make the typical American audience deeply uncomfortable. And that’s the trouble with a culture of patronizing concealment and proud mendacity, its consequences linger on and on throughout the lifelong adolescence we style adulthood.
And this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, god give thee good enlightenment, my master in the pit, for behold all earth is laid in the peace which I have made, and behold I wait on thee to trouble it…