I have always been opposed to book burning. I was brought up to believe that books are our friends. From the moment that I was old enough to understand that book burning represents the violent suppression of ideas and intellectual freedom, I have known it was wrong.
Yesterday I had a bad moment that challenged those beliefs. It wasn’t more than a few seconds.
British fiction author JK Rowling inserted herself into an event at the Paris Olympics and spewed a lot of hateful, ignorant nonsense. And for just a moment I wished that all her books would burst into flame.
It’s not the books that are the problem. The harm that is caused by JK Rowling comes from her brain, her attitudes, her appalling lack of knowledge and empathy. But the multimillion dollar success of her books has given her a platform to make hateful accusations about transgender human beings who have never done her any harm. This weekend she chose to extend that to anyone who doesn’t look cisgender enough to meet her own personal criteria.
If it weren’t for the fortune generated by those books, Rowling would be just another hateful, uninformed busybody. Her outsized influence with others who share her backward and harmful views would never have existed.
All of us have a choice in life to use our powers for good or evil. When you look at Rowling you see what wealth and fame has empowered and it’s ugly. Imagine how much good her money and social capital might have brought into the world if she had chosen love instead of hate.
If an unknown Rowling had stood on a box in Hyde Park and ranted against trans, non binary, and intersex people would she be raking in the cash? I doubt it. Yet, here we are, witnessing all the hurt that one person can cause by harnessing the discretionary income of millions of fiction readers.
I still don’t believe in book burning. There’s no solution in that. The solution comes, I hope, in standing up to bullies and in refusing to buy what they are selling.
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