Fight for The Freedom to Read: The Librarians Film Review
Still from The Librarians.
Books create a world of imagination for anyone of any age. A library is a beautiful place to go when you want to learn more about the world, culture, or even yourself. Being able to access books should be simple, right? Why wouldn’t you get to read what you want to read within a free society, especially in the United States of America, a country that boasts of its “freedom for all”? In The Librarians audiences are transported to the very real events that have and are occurring in the USA regarding book bans for school aged children, ranging from kindergarten to high school. This is something that Albertans may be familiar with, as earlier this year the United Conservative Party attempted to get Albertan librarians to come up with a list of books that included “sexually explicit” material within school libraries. Books like Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, A Game of Thrones, Gender Queer, Flamer, The Godfather, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Color Purple, and countless other books. In The Librarians we can see the potential of what can happen to our schools, librarians, and children if governments are able to control the flow of free information and the censorship of knowledge due to faith based politics. Book bans like these specifically target the LGBTQIA2S+ community, children of colour, and youth that simply want to escape into a world that is outside of their own. Books are a place for self discovery, a tangible item that can reaffirm who you are, and provide a safe space to feel. If you can control a library you can control a community, and the ideas contained within the minds of those who reside there.
We are in an era where misinformation spreads like wildfire, infecting the minds of people we know and people we don’t, and that is on full display within The Librarians. People who have been working in libraries for years being accused of pedophilia, getting death threats, and needing security from their own neighbours all because they want to keep a book like The Color Purple on the shelf at a library. The issue at hand when book bans like these come into play is freedom. The freedom to read, the freedom to express, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to exist. The Librarians is a look into how political faith based ideology can turn into aggressive levels of censorship. Maybe you’re thinking “oh we’re safe from that, we’re in Canada!”, and for that you would be incredibly beyond mistaken. Currently the UCP Government is using the notwithstanding clause against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, and teachers within Alberta, setting an extremely dark precedent for the future under the UCP. Just in case you haven’t been keeping up with the news, the UCP has weaponized the notwithstanding clause four times within a month. If they will take away the rights of teachers and of trans and queer children, they will absolutely take away your rights too. The book ban that took hold in the USA was the blueprint for Alberta’s current plans to take away certain books that display “sexually explicit material”. Though we in Alberta have not yet reached the point of books being removed from shelves it’s easy to see how we could get there, and this documentary paints a very stark picture of what our future of division could soon look like. It is a tremendously important documentary, especially for people living in Alberta. Watching this was like holding up a mirror to my own province, a place I love with politicians that are ruining the very sense of community that I hold so dear. Do not let something like this happen in Alberta. Speak up. Write to your government officials, call them, protest, don’t take this abuse of power lying down.