Burn Phones, Not Books
Poem by Brendan Praniewicz
Burn Phones, Not Books by Brendan Praniewicz exposes the hypocrisy of banning books while giving kids unfiltered internet access—where every "banned" classic lives on. A fiery critique of modern censorship.
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Let’s ban all these books from schools so we can shelter all these young minds but let children have Iphones and laptops where all banned books are found online: Nabokov’s Lolita and the Bhagavad Gita The Bluest Eye, The Catcher in the Rye Of Mice and Men, Gone with the Wind Huckelberry Finn, All the King’s Men Rabbit Run, Native Son, Fahrenheit 451 A Wrinkle in Time, Nickel and Dimed Lord of the Rings, The Caged Bird Sings Romeo and Juliet, Blood and Chocolate, All Harry Potter, Lady Chatterley’s Lover The Satanic Verses and Almost Perfect Every book of the Bible, Call of the Wild This Book is Gay, Fifty Shades of Gray The Chocolate War, A Clockwork Orange Sister’s Keeper, Snow Falling on Cedars. So we’ll shield children from all of these novels but these iPad hold things deemed more awful: eating disorders on Instagram, porn with step fam twenty-four hour sex cams, drugs sold in kilograms feminism, chauvinism, misogynism, masochism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, Trumpism curated comparisons and 3D printed assault guns so many lies from an election that was never won pervy Hollywood groomers, 21st Century doomers nonstop propaganda, and fake news memorandas YouTube conspiracies, and revisions to our history cookies and bots, pop-up ads that make us shop violent video games, social feeds intent to shame hate speech shared endlessly, hackers after identity. Why ban books that children should not see when there’s so much worse on technology so maybe monitor children’s internet history before banning books from school libraries.
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Brendan Praniewicz earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State in 2007 and teaches creative writing at San Diego colleges. He received second place in a first-chapters competition in the Seven Hills Review Chapter Competition in 2019. He won first place in The Rilla Askew Short Fiction Contest in 2020. He was a 2023 Pushcart Nominee.
Brilliant!
Good work!