Someone once said that if you can learn to play a musical instrument, you will have gained a friend for life.

I would posit that the same thing applies to books.

I’ve loved books since I was in pre-school and Mom read me picture stories like Peter Cottontail and Jack and the Beanstalk. After learning to read in first grade, she bought me Easy Reader-series books off the grocery store carousel. Then she drove me to local bookmobiles so I could sign out books like The Mouse and the Motorcycle and The Borrowers.

My favorite school day was Book Fair Day. Hundreds of shiny new books for purchase, spread out on multiple tables in the library. For this kid, it was every bit as heart-pumping as having a dollar to blow inside a candy store. We wrote our names on order forms near each book, and the goodies would be delivered weeks later. My anticipation reached Christmas Eve heights.

In high school, I’d have my study halls in the school library. Here, I read entire novels, ranging from Kenneth Grahame‘s phantasmic The Wind in the Willows to Truman Capote‘s harrowing In Cold Blood. Right now I’m reading a biography of Simón Bolívar, who liberated South America from Spain. Thomas Wolfe‘s classic, Look Homeward, Angel, is on the docket. (I just visited his childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina.)

It’s an understatement to say, reading books has enhanced my life by broadening my mind and horizons. They’ve done the same thing for millions of others lucky enough to discover their magic and even healing power.

As most everyone now knows, the United States is experiencing an existential crisis. In only a few decades, or maybe just a few years, America has undergone a sea change in its value system. Success over truth. Strength over compassion. Power over justice. Supernatural over science. Or maybe this corrupt value system was alteady there, and only now is there a spotlight on it. I’ve tried to document many of the disturbing developments in this blog. One thing I’ve yet to talk about, at least in detail, is our epidemic of censorship and book banning. But this is happening now, as I write, on a grand scale.

Recently – coincidentally, the same night as the final broadcast of The Stephen Colbert Show (another casualty of fascism and the assault on free speech) – I watched a very good documentary called The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder.

The Librarians profiles five librarians whose libraries were targeted by far-right politicians, school boards, and private citizens. Their libraries carried books which the attackers deemed controversial. In some cases, the librarians themselves were attacked. One of them received death threats. Another was summarily fired for no apparent reason other than objecting to indiscriminate removal of certain books.

All the librarians profiled here chose their career paths because they love books and merely wanted to share that love. They never imagined they would have to fight fascism in vicious town hall meetings, have their tires slashed, and be referred to as “c- -t” in hate-filled emails.

One might think the books targeted were done so for being excessively violent – not that even violent books, like In Cold Blood and similar, should not be protected by the Constitution. But the culprit, oddly (though maybe not so oddly for America), is not violence. Most were targeted because they deal with sexuality and race. Not too surprisingly, most of the attackers are militant conservative Christians…proudly wearing America’s colors as they hypocritically try to repress freedom of speech and shatter the wall between state and church. Most live in the American South (the so-called “Bible Belt”). The school boards and politicians are assisted by oxymoronically-named Moms for Liberty, a group formed to fight COVID masking requirements and vaccination recommendations, but who shifted their right-wing activism once the virus was under control.

Most books in The Librarians were yanked from school libraries. Repeatedly, one hears the attackers using hot-button words like “pornographic” and “grooming.” Authors and librarians are, in the attackers’ opinions, “grooming” young people for sexual deviancy because certain books deal candidly with LGBTQ issues. They are evidently “pornographic” for that reason, and for – believe it or not – displays of nudity. A graphic version of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has an illustration of classic-antiquity statues of naked people. Art Spiegelman’s Maus shows naked mice being herded toward execution.

(But is the issue here really nudity? Or is nudity merely one of many diversionary tactics, smokescreens for a deeper and more insidious campaign? Perhaps a campaign by the extreme right against knowledge and critical thinking, skills necessary to question and challenge authority?)

Several people in The Libraries are particularly memorable. A black pastor appears before a school board, eloquently expressing shock and outrage that black history books have been removed, while the racist, all-white board sits in dumb silence. A courageous gay man tearfully pleads that LGBTQ books not be banned, while his fanatical Christian mother, who has rejected him, hovers nearby, robotically aiming her cellphone to record everything he says. A Texas school board member has a change of heart after discovering her district is merely one part of a statewide, highly politicized, and heavily financed campaign of suppression. One librarian (spoiler alert) speaks while shrouded in shadow, but steps into the light at the end of the film because she’s tired of cowering in fear, and decides to face the demon, literally, head-on.

And there’s the sad, surreal spectacle of high school students pleading before rigid, puritannical adults against suppression of ideas.

With everything that by now has gone under the bridge, there is no longer any question that Donald Trump is the most despicable public figure America has ever seen, based on policy, behavior, and any other yardstick one might choose to measure him by. However, he has done one good thing: he’s given a green light to the darkest impulses that have roiled under the American myth for 250 years. He’s drawn out the pus underlying this country’s festering sores. Our infected wounds can do one of two things: kill us slowly by gangrene, or propel us toward some kind of long healing process.

One of the librarians in The Librarians remarked how the U.S. is now perched on a figurative cliff, and may have already toppled over it. She was interviewed way back in 2025. Maybe earlier.

It is now mid-2026. For me, the termination of our horrifying free fall just can’t come soon enough.

(R.I.P. Sen. Barney Frank, 1940-2026)