Here's My Point: We Owe Our Children Better

By Ron Fitzwater

For both personal and professional reasons, I am a huge fan of the First Amendment. One of the most important things that this country allows is the free exchange of thought and ideas as well as providing an outlet for artistic expression.

Freedom of speech, however, does come with some level of responsibility to the individual that exercises it and the publishing companies that disseminate it, because the words we speak and write are important. You have heard the saying "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater and you can't yell bomb on an airplane," and those are true. Try it sometime and see what happens. Wait, that was a joke. Don't do either of those. Please.

Now, as true as those words are, there are other areas of speech and written word where forethought should be used, but are not.

What put me on this trail of thought was something that happened at my home this past weekend.

Over the weekend a friend of my family came to our home for a visit and brought his son. Now this is a nine-year-old boy and, like most nine-year-old boys, he wanted to shoot basketball and set up a tent in the back yard. You know, all the fun stuff. Well as you know this past weekend was a bit wet and the poor kid was forced to be inside more than he liked. But instead of hitting the video games, I was very happy to see that he was reading a book. I love to see kids read and just don't see enough of it. That said, after seeing what he was reading I found myself wishing he would have chosen the X-Box instead.

The piece literature (and I use that term very loosely) he was reading is called Zombie Butts from Uranus by an Australian author (also using that term loosely) Andy Griffiths, and I have to tell you that I don't know what angered me more: the premise, or the publication of the book. My displeasure at the existence of the book was passed on to his Dad for buying it and I asked him where it came from. Imagine if you can my surprise when I found out that it was purchased at a school book fair and had been published by the very well known youth book seller, Scholastic.

Now, I believe that all artists have the right to publish their works. I hope to one day as well, but I also believe that some responsibility has to be exercised in disseminating literature to children. This book is completely unacceptable for kids and I just have to ask if Scholastic, like so many other businesses, has simply devolved into a company that is totally driven by profits and has lost its purpose which, according to their mission statement, is "helping children read" because "literacy is the cornerstone of a child's intellectual, personal and cultural growth?"

With all the books and authors out there for children, why would a historic and respected company like Scholastic choose to publish this sort of trash when Huck and Jim are still on the river learning about life, death, honesty and racial injustice? Aren't those the ideas we should be nurturing in our children?

Here is just a small smattering of the book's text that I promise I chose at random by just flipping the pages and jamming a finger in to stop. My finger stopped on the page containing this passage.

"Gran jumped up and threw herself on top of the butt. It jumped into the air trying desperately to buck her off but she clung tight. Then, in the most spectacular display of pinching prowess Zack had ever seen, Gran pinched it into two halves, the two halves into quarters, and then the quarters into eighths. Her fingers were just a blur as she shredded the butt into smaller and smaller pieces. "Is there a water faucet around here"? said Gran when she'd finished, holding her hands out in front of her.

Aside from a small assist in learning fractions, there is nothing redeeming about this passage. It is even grammatically wrong because Gran did not say a question she asked a question. So it is even written badly. "Is there a water faucet around here"? asked Gran" is how it should have been written.

Now, I know that I write a lot of things that people disagree with, but I do try to do it in a way that is at least understandable and hopefully not disgusting, but I am writing for adults (young and older) this book is targeting children.

People are always asking "what's wrong with kids today?" and "why do they act the way they do, they don't have any sense of proper behavior?" and so on. They blame television, movies an the internet, but after seeing this book and looking at other books by this author such as The Day My Butt Went Psycho, (Zombie Butts was the sequel) and other titles at Scholastic and Amazon, as well as other children's book sites, I have to believe that a lot of what is wrong with some kids is that they are allowed to read mindless crap like this book.

My plea to parents is to look very closely at the books your child wants to buy from book sales. They can get great books out there such as Green Wilma, Frog in Space by Ted Arnold or Smoke Mountain by Erin Hunter, two great adventure books for younger readers. Then there are always the classics like Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels and the aforementioned Huckleberry Finn. Otherwise you might just as well plop them down in front of the television. At least there is PBS and the Discovery Channel, and who knows, they might accidentally learn something.