by Richard Fireman
It has come to this: Escambia County, Florida, schools have banned the dictionary. Five dictionaries are on the district’s list of more than 1,600 books banned pending investigation in December 2023, along with eight different encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not—all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with “sexual conduct” from schools. —PEN America, January 9, 2024
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If thine eye offend thee pluck it out says the Bible, and we know the Florida governor is a righteous man, with principles and not much thought. His laws just made one county remove the dictionary from library bookshelves. Now where do the children find their answers except in the abundancy of misinformation? Plenty of that to go around, no worry. You say the kids can ask their parents what the truth is but they’re the ones who voted the fool into office so not much help there. It seems they’ll have to wait till they can vote if they can figure out how to do that if there even is a vote by then if there even is a world. But meantime they’ll just have to remain in their literally meaningless limbo and we have to wonder if it’s a coincidence that the state’s initial is the grade its education deserves.
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Richard Fireman, writing for over fifty years, has given readings at several libraries and Barnes & Noble, and has published over a hundred poems. In 2009 he contributed a chapter to the bibliotherapy book Writing Away the Demons. In September 2022 ten of his poems (five of which had previously been published) were featured in The Thursday Poets' Anthology: Dreams and Realities, along with those of eight of his fellow online writing circle members. His first poetry collection Constellations was published by Prolific Pulse Press in December 2022.
Bravo, Richard! It pains me to say that I grew up in Escambia County. One of my fondest classroom memories is the day my middle school English teacher taught us that "pillow" and "pillar" are homonyms (to her they were).
As a retired middle/high school English teacher, I cannot even. . .someone please wake me up from this nightmare!