It's Banned Books Week.

Reading changes you. It makes you more of what's best in humanity and it gives you better ideas and understandings than any other activity, bar none.

Don't let someone's outmoded or wrongheaded or simply stupid fear of knowledge and wisdom and empathy flowing from books shut off access to views they don't like. Remember that when you choose silence in the face of censorship, you set the stage for your own views to be silenced.

Which is why there are so many challenges to books in libraries and schools. Banning a book, removing it from the shelves, means a voice silenced that makes someone uncomfortable.

Libraries and schools, like newspapers, should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Extra credit: Who spoke the original of that quote?

(Cartoon by Hanna-Riikka)

Or gossip, shout or even WHISPER...