Let’s face it. The Pennridge community has never been a hotbed of progressive thinking. During my junior year of high school, 1964-65, Robert Hollenbach stuck his neck out and had us read “Catcher in the Rye” in English class. The book was controversial because at one point Holden Caulfield finds the F-Word graffitied in the stairwell of his apartment building and is worried that his little sister will see it. Whether he got any complaints from parents or administrators for his boldness, I have no idea, but I still remember the risqué thrill of actually reading that book in class.
We had a couple of Jewish families in the area back in those days, and one Black family, and most folks prided themselves on being a welcoming Christian community. My father, who was the pastor of St. Stephen’s UCC in Perkasie for three decades, once hosted a Black UCC minister from Ghana; he stayed in our home for three weeks, and that was really something.
Alas, the thinking in the Pennridge community doesn’t seem to have evolved much since then. A few years ago, a group of students took part in a protest against gun violence by staging a walkout during the school day. They thought it was important to let somebody know that they didn’t care to get shot while attending school, and wanted somebody to do something about that.
School administrators responded by giving the kids Saturday morning detention, and the school board hired armed guards to protect the students. Two armed guards, if I recall, to spread themselves around among seven elementary schools, three middle schools, and a two-building upper school. I wonder how that’s going to work if an armed intruder starts shooting up one of those 12 buildings. Especially when you consider how well good guys with guns managed to perform at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., or Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. So much for good guys with guns.
Not long after that, the Pennridge School Board disbanded its Diversity Equity Inclusion Committee in favor of an unwieldy ad hoc committee chaired by a person who has gone on record that there is no such thing as structural or institutional racism in the Pennridge community or the nation at large. That assurance must be very comforting to every person of color who hears it.
But now there’s a new bugaboo in Pennridgeland: authors who are trying to brainwash our children into being gay and books that are rife with “smut and filth.” We must get these books off the shelves of our school libraries before they pollute the vulnerable minds of our innocent children.
Now it isn’t like today’s equivalent of Mr. Hollenbach assigning any of these books in class or threatening to flunk students if they don’t read “A Queer History of the United States for Young People” or “Heather Has Two Mommies.”
The books the school board is pulling off the shelves are simply sitting there on the shelves. If a student wants to read a book, the student has to go to the library, pull the book off the shelf, take it to the circulation desk and sign it out.
Moreover the quickest way to get a kid interested in reading a particular book is to say, “You aren’t allowed to read this book!” I mean, seriously, have all these adults who have their knickers in a knot over the “pornography” and “sexual deviance” available to their children in our school libraries forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager? I taught high school for many years, and I can guarantee that telling a kid “you can’t” is like waving a red flag at a bull. Take the books off the school library shelves, and a lot of these kids will find these books in other places — online, via friends, even in bookstores. “What’s written here that is so vile I’m not supposed to read it?”
Meanwhile, this country is awash in guns. There are now more guns in the hands of private citizens than there are private citizens to own them. Mass shootings have become a weekly occurrence, and often even a daily occurrence. And if you think all these guns are making you safer, you’d better not knock on the wrong front door or turn into the wrong driveway.
The divide between red states and blue states gets wider with each election and each court decision. The body politic of this nation is so fractured that it resembles Humpty Dumpty, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men don’t seem to be able to put it back together again.
At the global level, the planet is not-so-slowly turning into a hothouse. Ocean temperatures are rising at an alarming rate with dire environmental consequences. Earth’s glaciers are melting at an equally alarming rate. An iceberg twice the size of New York City just broke off Antarctica a few months ago. Hundred-year catastrophes like floods, hurricanes, forest fires, and droughts are happening every year.
And people have nothing better to do than worry about a few books on school library shelves?
It brings to mind the Emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.
W. D. Ehrhart is a 1966 graduate of Pennridge High School and a 2003 Inductee to the Pennridge Wall of Fame. He now lives in Bryn Mawr.
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