I'll Take The High Road
Now That I Realize That Doing So Doesn't Mean Being Nice To Sucky People
I’m still stunned by the decision of my county library board to banish a children’s book that depicts a child who is exactly like some unknown number of real-life children who visit our county library. I’m stunned because they banned it specifically for the ways that the featured character is like those real-life children.
In my last post, also about the banishment of this book (and others that represent trans folx) from the children’s section, I was astonished how several board members casually expressed their revulsion toward the book as if nobody would notice that they were flat out revealing how they feel that way toward the real life children who are just like the child in the book. Sure, the board members kept saying they were concerned the book would encourage some children to become like that child - but they never acknowledged the irrefutable fact that these children are presently out there, in our neighborhoods, in our schools, visiting our libraries, and - yes - befriending other children in our libraries, all as children ought to be doing.
I think it’s no coincidence that this particular library system has a sorry, sordid past with gatekeeping children and deciding which of them are worthy of passing through its doors…dating back to when they took direct aim at Black children. The library system lost its hard-fought battle over who can visit the book stacks in the flesh-and-blood, so they staked a “new” (as in regurgitated) morally indefensible position by regulating who can visit those stacks within the pages of books.
In my mind’s eye, I see the cackling board members rubbing their puny, slimy hands, thinking they’re clever for pulling an end-run on the Constitution by making the shelves barren of the people they don’t want to show up as library patrons. They banned Juneteenth book displays last year, so they’re clearly not changing who they despise. Their list of undesirables only grows incrementally as they reboot Jim Crow-era tactics to diminish Black, brown, disabled, neurodivergent, immigrant, and Q+ people.
(As an aside, their lack of tactical originality pisses me off, while I’m simultaneously grateful for the ineptitude by which they tarry forth.)
Looking back over my last post, I referred to the members of the library board as phlegmatic, vomitous, and pestiferous yet I feel as though I failed to adequately express myself having never got ‘round to invoking bile, pus, cancer, excrement, gangrene, toe jam, and snot.
3 out of 10 is a half-assed effort. Which is why I’m back…
…but as I endeavor to go low - which I find highly cathartic - it strikes me that my response was not up to the challenge because I failed to take the high road.
I need to explain.
There was a small window last week when I might have talked to a local news station about the library’s decision. Fortunately, a far better spokesperson was able to respond to the reporter because they made that work via Zoom.
Still, not yet knowing the reporter’s request for a comment was fulfilled, I gave some thought as to what I might have to say in the course of deciding whether I should step up to his interview request. Typically, being a lawyer, my value to the reporter would be to share lawyerly observations - of which I have many given the bumbling way the board forged ahead with their votes last Monday.
Vocationally speaking, I’m hard-wired to go on the attack - but when I decided that I had something worth saying, that’s not what I was inclined to share with the reporter.
I was prepared to speak because I decided that this was the right time to take the high road.
It’s also why my last post feels so inadequate to the moment.
When I say I want to take the high road, I don’t mean to imply that I wish to act honorably toward the collective crotch rot we call a library board.
Screw them.
I shall pay no visit to them from that path.
My sense of inadequacy for taking the low road in my last post hit me when I realized I had passed up the opportunity to take the high road that runs in the other direction.
What I wanted to say to however many people still watch local news needed to be directed to and focused on the people who were under attack. In satisfying my need for catharsis, I had missed the chance to take the high road traveling in their direction.
I’ll indict only myself here in confessing that my first instinct is to go low, embrace the toxicity, and inflict verbal and legal damage on those who use power and privilege to do crappy things.
I think times like this call for many of us - those with the most bandwidth to engage - to send care, comfort, and concern inward, to the people under the aim of the outrageous harmful behavior.
From the high road, my message to all the people who relate to the people our library board deems “age inappropriate” (or “harmful” or the subject of banishment) is that those who are small of heart are small in number. The high road is how this county establishes that our prevailing community standard accepts and even loves those people just as they are, without any of them having to change or amend their identities for the sake of making a few rigid people comfortable.
My sense of urgency to share these high road sentiments stems from the gruesome statistical certainty that among the children who identify with the characters being banished and vanished from the stacks, some are living with and being raised by parents and grandparents who openly voice their agreement with - and possibly even directly voted in support of - the library board’s vile rationales for taking action last week.
That must be terrifying for those people.
My venom, dripping downward along the low road that meanders to the greasy gutter where our library board resides, face down, fails to do anything toward resolving or relieving the statistically certain terror this library vote has ratcheted up.
Those people - and I think there are many adults counted among those who reasonably feel terrorized in their homes and by their own family members right now - need to know that beyond the walls that offer physical shelter, there are many of us who are in their camp, who want them to thrive, who value them especially for the ways they’re different and distinct from the norms that a handful of people wish them to resemble.
I need to do a better job of remembering how, as fun as it is for me to take the low road, there are times when taking the high road needs to be my top priority.
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(That’s the end of my post, but here’s a bonus observation. There’s this interesting idea of using concentric circles to figure out when to send comfort in - the high road, of sorts - and when to dump out - the low road, of sorts - that was conceived in terms of defining who gets to say what to whom when someone is dealing with bad news, like a cancer diagnosis. Called the “Ring Theory” it was developed by Susan Silk and her partner, Barry Goldman. There are many articles on this now, but you may find it helpful to start at the beginning with this 2013 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, in which I believe they first rolled it out publicly. Similar constructs may predate it but it was this articulation and visualization that I’ve found helpful. I submit the Ring Theory has some bearing on my sense that I had spent too much time on the low road when reacting to last week’s votes by my bilious, gangrenous, malignant, oozing pustule-esque, shit-stain licking, toe jam sniffing, booger-eating library board. Ahhhhh…yes. That’s better.)