A Florida bookseller has written an impassioned article for the Tampa Bay Times stressing the importance of unfettered access to books and attacking recent book bans in the state. Sally Bradshaw, owner of Midtown Reader in Tallahassee, Florida, says: As a bookworm growing up in a small Southern town, books were my portal to worlds very different from my own. Our public library was a sanctuary. Our local bookstore, a hidden gem .. It was among those bookshelves that I found the power to see into a world beyond my own experience; to understand the far-ranging thoughts of others, and to find comfort in the knowledge that people can become extraordinary despite the trauma and challenges they endure.
Never did I imagine that other children would not have the power and solace afforded by unfettered access to books. Yet, today this is the stark new reality in Florida and increasingly across America. We have arrived at the Orwellian moment when under the ironic cry of ‘freedom,’ the Florida government has effectively empowered extremist groups and outliers to become censors for everyone, pulling literature from public bookshelves if just one parent finds a book offensive. More than 350 books have been removed from school shelves in Florida over the last year.
She says that in Floridas Panhandle, this has a particularly devastating effect because rampant poverty in the region makes libraries the only available source of books for many thousands of children. Books illuminate other lives and other experiences and Bradshaw asks: Without books in libraries which make those stories available to all, how will we give these children the tools to understand and overcome their own circumstances and provide a vision to which they can aspire?
She concludes: We’ve worked hard to be a place where everyone, of every background and political persuasion, can gather to read, think and share. We’ve refrained from partisan battles preferring to provide diverse content and allow readers to pursue ideas and consider opposing viewpoints as a healthy and appropriate outcome of reading and learning.
But when it comes to real freedom the kind where you exercise the sovereignty of the individual while others are fully allowed to do the same there can be no compromise.
