Like many other books, Slaughter House Five has been hit with the ban hammer, and was removed from our school boards, forbade to be taught. But what is really the point...? As we can see, we're reading the book right now, and have read and will be reading other such books which were censored- So the judgement has been overturned, so was there a point in censoring something in the first place?
Censorship for the protection of a population is just bogus. No idea, no matter how radical or disgusting should be withheld from an audience on the basis that is is offensive or inappropriate. Truth, is offensive and inappropriate. In fact, life itself is offensive and inappropriate, so how stupid is it hide something that we're exposed to, hiding the truth of things. If someone is offended, thats great! Let them be offended, there's nothing wrong with thinking something is wrong, letting the idea challenge someone's morals makes people think more about what they believe in rather than what they ought to believe in. Maybe they'll even reconsider and adopt the radical idea or else reinforce what they were originally against. Slaughterhouse was censored because of its profanity (blunt, disgusting, inappropriate reality of the world) and critical opinion on the American Army. Criticism never hurt anyone: It might even help fix the problem or just see the view point of someone else. Just because you don't like an idea, doesn't mean you should censor it.
Now that we have established that its bad to censor, we should talk about who censors. All the censoring was done by the administration of school boards... just a bunch of old guys that are pushing their own views on other people. They aren't trained critics of literature, trained censors or anything, and therefore its extremely inappropriate for them to censor! I bet they haven't read half the books that they ended up censoring. And we can see what happened to the books they deemed inappropriate for us: our curriculum is now focused on them and the banning was overturned.
Lastly, censorship just doesn't work. Censoring something makes it into a controversy which makes everybody curious. Which leads everybody to reading the explicit material. It would be far better if they just put a warning that said "may offend, don't read if your morals are weak". Censoring is wrong, it prevents new ideas and opinions, is censored by the wrong people and doesn't even work most of the time. Read every opinion. Make your own decisions. Don't hide the truth.
-Daniel
