Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
This book is a quick read, but I believe very important to read. It's all about censorship, book burning, and losing the freedom to speak , write, and think for ourselves, and what a meaningless and self absorbed, cruel the world becomes because of that lack of freedom.
I found a paragraph in the afterword that was very important to us in the current era: " For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conservationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicago intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot", may the belt unravel and the pants fall. "
We are living in a world where everybody finds offense at something--either not enough diversity, not enough LGBTQ support, not enough sensitivity to this or that minority or faction, and the end result means that stories are not written with the power and meaning that they should be written with because the writer has to put first and foremost equity and diversity and careful treatment of each faction as priority. He must not write them in a negative light, and I have even heard some people are now boycotting some authors because they are writing books about people that are not their race and crying "cultural appropriation". So you can't write about a person or culture unless you ARE that person or culture??!
And if the writer does not please all, the writer is blackballed or fined, boycotted for being bigoted, destroyed for not pleasing everyone. In this story, book burning and banning happened because of the offense of each diverse faction, race, religion, or ideology. If someone didn't like how something was portrayed, then they would rip the page out or burn the book. The people, and the government, decided that thinking for oneself was divisive, that all needed to be united, and that the government was to be the one to tell people how they should think. We must be careful that we don't let this book become a reality, because it very well could become such.
