How Screwed Up Is America?

I'm not sure anyone actually knows the answer, but after reading this librarian's letter over at Neil Gaiman's blog, you'd have to think the answer is, "Very!"

Whenever I encounter things like this, I try - struggle! - to remember that the people involved almost certainly believe they're doing good work and actually making it a better world by their actions. It's funny how there are so many things you can do that virtually no one would dispute the virtue of: reading to a blind or elderly person, helping out at a homeless shelter, giving money to a relief fund, or even just giving someone a hand to cross an icy street! In all those cases, help is offered and generally accepted with great thanks!

And then there are those areas where people feel they have to impose their own value systems on others, usually in the form of telling them what they can or can't do, read, eat, watch, listen to or think. My own perspective is that any parent who thinks it's anyone's job but theirs to monitor what their kids are doing, reading, eating, watching, listening to or thinking, is clearly an unfit parent. They're lazy, to the point of wanting someone else to enforce what they're incapable of controlling. But you won't see me out there picketing to have their children taken away from them, despite how much I think it's warrented...