Our Footloose Moment
Join us for Big Hill Book’s Oct. 7 “Open Mic for Banned Books” read-aloud event
~ From the virtual desk of J.P. Mathers ~
In the 1984 movie, Footloose, a scene reveals what the movie (and the moment we’re currently in) is all about. Spoiler alert, it’s not dancing. New-to-town Ren McCormack stumbles into this exchange:
Bow-tied man: Reverend, we have a little problem. I heard that the English teacher over at the high school is planning to teach that book.
Uptight woman: Slaughterhouse Five. Isn’t that an awful name?
Ren (until now, minding his own business): Oh yeah, that’s a great book. Slaughterhouse Five. It’s a classic.
Mr. Bow-tie: Do you read much?
Mrs. Uptight: Maybe in another town it’s a classic.
Ren: In any town.
Fast forward another hour into the movie, and a scene befitting a 1930s newsreel of Hitler’s Germany plays out on the quad of Ren’s high school—a good old-fashioned book burning.
America is in the midst of its own Footloose Moment. Book banning, that tired authoritarian tool, has been dusted off by a tiny, frightened minority that loves nothing more than a good moral panic. They stir up paranoia while launching legislative efforts. But generally—with the passage of time and an understanding that the sky hasn’t fallen—what once was a mortal threat proves harmless, and most people are left to wonder why they were so afraid in the first place.
Perhaps you recall the panic sourrounding McCarthyism and the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s. Or the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, anyone?
Now there’s a whole new “panic” lurking in broad daylight behind the guise of parental rights. A small but well-funded army of moms has swarmed school board meetings, waving books they haven’t read, claiming these books are being used to “groom” their children. Groom them to do what—show a little tolerance and understanding?
But there’s the rub. They don’t want their children to be more tolerant or understanding. They want their children to be just like them. They fear a changing world so much that they reach for any boogeyman they can find—in this case, books—and shout “indoctrination.”
But if I know anything about kids it’s this: tell them what they can’t read, what they can’t listen to, what they shouldn’t question and they’ll do exactly the opposite.
After all, kids are innately curious, and they don’t scare easily. They see the world we’ve made for them and know they can make a better one—one that’s more tolerant, more accepting, and more understanding. Because Ren McCormack wasn’t wrong when he so prophetically proclaimed, “It’s our time to dance.”
