There’s nothing funny about this news • Nebraska Examiner

The combination of two recent headlines – one reporting on another school shooting, the other on the reaction to the appointment of an accountant as director of Nebraska’s libraries – reminded me of the words of comedian Wanda Sykes: “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, we’re paying attention to the wrong things.” (I cleaned it up a bit.)

None of this is funny.

First, Governor Jim Pillen Terri Cunningham Swanson, a former member of the Plattsmouth School Board, to the Nebraska Library Board, where she insulted 1,649 Plattsmouth residents who voted to remove her from the local council for submitting endless book reviews. That’s an insult with a capital D, underlined, bold, all caps, and marked with a series of asterisks.

To get the full picture of disrespect, you only have to include the thousands of Nebrasans who recognize the harm and folly of a sustained attack on the preservation of the rich and diverse literary canon available to students in the state’s public schools.

Pillen wasn’t the first to put book titles at risk with a Nebraska Library Commission board member. His predecessor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, appointed Tiffany Carter, whose credibility has been honed in the world of book challenges, which, as has been widely reported, often come from concerned parents who haven’t bothered to read the book, just the passages they find offensive. The metaphor seems obvious, but doing all the homework might be a good start to substantiating a challenge.

Moreover, no one is requiring third-graders to read “Myra Breckinridge” or high school English classes to analyze the writings of Masters and Johnson. Most Nebraska schools have policies that allow parents to opt their children out of classes or books without telling other parents what their children should read – the hallmark of challenging bans is the ultimate goal.

Still, it should give us pause for thought that some members of the Library Board have less faith in the professional librarians and experienced teachers in our state than a group of critics who challenge excerpts from books.

Books and guns. Sykes argues that our focus on restricting or eliminating the former distracts from the attention we should be paying to the latter and from the fear that guns leave behind when they appear in schools.

Which brings us to the latest school shooting, the ongoing social discontent that presidential candidate Donald Trump wants us to “put behind” and “move on.” (Of course, he also told a crowd at a rally last week that sex-reassignment surgeries are performed in schools, so there you go.)

In an equally heartless portrayal of the truth, his running mate JD Vance views school shootings as a “fact of life.”

That the sun rises in the east and gravity are facts of life. That change is inevitable and growth is optional are facts of life. The truth that you measure twice and cut once is a fact of life.

That students and teachers die in schools at the hands of shooters using readily available weapons of war that are sometimes Christmas presents is not a fact of life; it is a fact of death and only death, a searing trauma for the loved ones of those who bleed to death in classrooms and hallways and libraries. Those left behind to mourn them may learn to live with that pain, but telling someone to get over it doesn’t heal anyone.

This nonsense is the same mindset that believes we should make schools even tougher instead of confronting the threat. The same mindset that insists the problem is mental illness and then uses that to justify voting against measures to strengthen mental health programs in schools. The same mindset that legally arms too-young, wildly unstable, and historically violent people with weapons designed for the battlefield, leaving the rest of us thinking and praying about being in the wrong place at the wrong time—in math class on a regular school day, or in the produce section of a supermarket, or in the food court of a mall—and praying that we survive when the bullets come.

Is it OK for us to live like this? Is it OK to send our children to school every morning knowing that they have been in someone’s crosshairs 417 times since the Columbine shooting in 1999? These horror scenarios mean, on average, more than one school shooting per month, over a quarter century.

Do we agree with this?

Otherwise, we should spend less time questioning books and more time denouncing those who stand in the way of solving the problem of school massacres.