Our Minds, Our Bodies, Our Hearts

As soon as I could read, I fell in love with books. Reading took me out of the life I was living. No longer was I an isolated girl in a small military town on the coast of North Carolina. I was with Francie in Brooklyn or with the March sisters during the Civil War. The summer between third and fourth grade, I met Anne Frank in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. Unlike my other books, The Diary of Anne Frank was not fiction; it was a true story. Anne’s diary ends abruptly when the Gestapo discover where she and her family are hiding and arrest them. From the book’s epilogue I learned that Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belson Concentration Camp. She was only fifteen. I cried off and on for a week.

My grief spurred me to read everything in our World Book Encyclopedias about World War II and the Holocaust. My fascination with this time period remains intact today. Anne taught me about the power of language, the joy in small things, and most importantly: how damn unfair life can be. Anne did nothing to the Germans to make them hate her or send her to her death. This lesson of life’s unfairness has stayed with me. Do I regret being introduced to this truth as a young child? Hell no!

I bless my mother for never stopping me from reading anything. I bless my darling dad for his love of reading. The war years were the most important years of their lives. Dad was a young Marine fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, where he was almost killed. Mother was a government girl working with secret documents at the War Department in DC. They sacrificed to end the war and defeat the fascists in Europe and Asia. My parents will always be heroes to me. All this they did so their country would remain free. How sad they would be to see how fascism has taken hold in America in 2022. We are less free than ever before.

In Texas, The Diary of Anne Frank has been banned from schools. Although Anne died at the hands of the Nazis, she lives through her diary. Yet Texas is determined to kill her again. Other wonderful authors who have been banned from schools in Republican-run states: John Green, Sherman Alexi, Toni Morrison, a Nobel-Prize winner. The list goes on. All banned because fascist politicians have made parents afraid that if their children glimpse worlds beyond their own, they may learn to think for themselves.

Beyond banning books, these same Republican fascists deny women the right to their own bodies. While Republicans cloak forced birth as concern for the “unborn,” their real goal is to control women. When African Americans were brought here on slave ships, they did not even have the right to their own bodies. That’s what being a slave means. Nothing is one’s own. Slave masters had dominion over the slaves’ bodies. That’s where we are today. Women have become slaves. We no longer have autonomy over our bodies. America is divided not into red and blue states, but into “slave” and “free” states.

But there is hope. We can still turn our ship of state around. I say to my fellow Americans: if you don’t want to read a certain book, don’t read it, but do not stop others from doing so; don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one, but give others the right to their bodies. Don’t like gay marriage? Then don’t marry someone of the same sex, but do not prevent others from following their hearts. We must give up these fascist ways and return to being the land of the free and the home of the brave.