“And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.”

This week, I met a student named Max.

This student, as he proudly told me, was named after the character in "THIS book," and from his desk he pulled out: 

Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. 
"Oh," I said, "are you Max?"*
"Yes!" he said.
And I said, "at the end of that book, when he comes home, his supper..."

And we said it together, "IS STILL HOT."**

Why do I tell you this?
Because books matter for many reasons, but one of them is that they connect people. To Max, I was a random grown-up in his classroom, but the minute I recited the last line of the book he's been connected to since birth, I was possibly okay to him. I didn't know Max, but I knew Max's book. And that mattered.

I've been thinking about this a lot these past weeks, in this time of book bans continuing to grow across the country, and growing oppression of about every group that has ever been marginalized, which I cannot link to a single source on, because there are so many. 
This past week alone: 

• The U.S. Department of Education proposed Title IX rule making that would allow limited bars of trans athletes in K-12 sports 
• Kansas over a governor's veto banned transgender athletes from women’s, girls’ sports
  
• The governors of both Indiana and Idaho signed bans on gender affirming health care
• The Idaho governor also signed a bill forbidding adults from assisting a minor in obtaining an abortion without parental permission
• As hundreds of students across the country walked out of school, and hundreds protested at the Tennessee state capitol, the Tennessee legislature responded by expelling the two young Black representatives, but not the white woman representative, who had protested with the students

...I'm sure I'm missing some. And that is just this week.

What does this have to do with books? 

Because books are one way--not the only way, but one way--that we can experience the life of someone else. 

Maybe you yourself, or even no one you know (you think) has been at a school with a shooting, or has been pregnant as a minor when it wasn't safe to tell your parents, or has needed gender affirming care, or been trans and wanted to play a sport, or any of the hundreds of other experiences we see state legislatures (in particular) outlawing.
But maybe you can read a book that can put you in the position of someone who does.
Books, then, are dangerous. Because books can make you see someone else's perspective. 
And thus books must be removed, as well.

It thus is crucial that we see this book bans for what they are: they are a way of pushing back on the lived human experiences of those within them. We have to fight the bans, just as we fight the laws. In both cases, we have to work, and protest, and create and defend public policies, that protect the people. 

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*my compliments to Max's family, by the way. I adore that a family looked at a tiny person and thought of Max and the Wild Things. Max also took very great pride in his connection to his book, so well done, Max's grown ups! 

**Max then took me on the tour of the books of his classroom, including the Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey, of which he was currently reading the first, but, he was delighted to tell me, his teacher had the newest one (which I see just came out at the end of March, so well done, Max's teacher!).