Just Sayin': Youth need more books, not fewer

Youth need more books, not fewer

Young people’s books are disappearing at an alarming rate from American classrooms and school libraries — casualties of an assault on reading and thinking.

Since 2021, more than 1,600 titles have been banned, according to PEN America, a writers’ group that supports freedom of expression. While most book bans have occurred in Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas, schools in other states, including New York, have also had brushes with censors.

Today’s taboo texts range from a biography of Rosa Parks and a history of the Ku Klux Klan to a memoir about growing up gay and a story about interracial teenage love. They join “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Persepolis” and “Maus,” classics that book banners continue to target.

The censors — parents’ groups, school boards and self-serving politicians, mainly — insist they are protecting kids from dangerous material. Some even question whether students should be exposed at all to topics such as slavery and the Holocaust or issues that might raise difficult personal questions.

But isn’t that what education is supposed to do? Shouldn’t education — good books, in particular — encourage students to examine and maybe rethink their assumptions about the world? If we expect the next generation to think critically about the planet they’ll inherit, they will need the information and ideas contained in many of those banned books.

 — Richard J. Conway,  Massapequa

Find right places to dispose of vape pens

As prior smokers change their tendencies from traditional combustion toward vaping nicotine, coupled with the introduction of recreational marijuana in New York State, a new piece of detritus is becoming an all-too-frequent find on Long Island roads and in its parks [“Tax vape products same as cigarettes,” LI Voices, March 11] .

Vaping devices, like their former counterparts, are regularly disposed of immediately by the user after their chemical tank is depleted, yet as the late ecologist and New Yorker Barry Commoner said, “There is no ‘waste’ in nature and there is no ‘away’ to which things can be thrown.”

Not only is this irresponsible dumping an eyesore to those in our communities, but the self-contained batteries can have a profound impact on our animal neighbors, the oceans they drain into and the groundwater we are so dependent on. Being familiar with the bins for used rechargeable batteries at the entrance of some home-improvement stores, I can’t help but ask, where is the home for these finished vape pens? I hope some readers don’t think our public spaces are the right place.

Maybe we should implement a deposit-type program, similar to the existing five-cent deposit for liquid containers, to encourage the responsible disposal of this growing trend.

 — Meridian Smith, Great River