YA Matters.

IN a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Young Adult Literature (YA) was put on blast for being too dark. This is all rooted in a conservative approach to controlling children, molding them into good little consumers. They are afraid to let the world be written about the way it actually is for some people. The problem is that people think a single book is a representative sample of the world, which is not true. People need to keep in mind that fiction has an agenda. Someone is trying to use.. a parable if you will.. to illustrate some point. The fact that the books feature serious themes, difficult for people to read about. YA functions as a form of catharsis for both people who suffer from serious social and emotional issues, and others who suffer from the banality of a middle-class consumer driven existence where helicopter parents interfere to the extent that they have made you co-dependent. This is a reality that the same helicopter parents want to deny exists.. because it maintains the status quo.

Calling the themes in YA dark adds another stigma to the literature. Creating the binary difference between light and dark, and qualifying each by equating light with good, and dark with bad, plants the seed of discrimination, and teaches future generations to place everyone they meet in hierarchies based on social privilege.

Although we must concede that the protest will never end because the self-righteous will maintain that God is on their side, and He would be appalled by the stories being read by young adults, even though the Bible has moments that include mutilation, suffering, betrayal; many of the themes that appear in the YA genre of contemporary rendition of the Western Judeo-Christian story.

We can not deny that the issues in these so-called “problem novels” do not exist. At the same time, we ought not give such a special emphasis to them as to elevate them to a form of sanctioned escapism—condoning cutting, suicide, gang-violence, etc. We should take no special note of them other than to acknowledge their existence so as not to bask in the bliss of ignorance. We must avoid the mindset of everything good is light, everything bad is dark, good is beautiful, bad is ugly, and so on. If that is the convention that you want, then I would suggest ignoring the YA genre altogether, and head on over to Disney.com.

Besides the fact that young people are reading in the age of no attention span, these books bring a little comfort to a small group of people who would otherwise be alone. YA serves as an emotional prosthetic, and it would be cruel to withhold both the opportunity to improve ones mind and imagination, but also to feel that perhaps other people experience such despair.

If parents with “taste” and “judgment” want to maintain the façade that the world does possess the kind of complicity and hardship as presented in these novels, they are only deluding themselves, and missing out on important parental aspects such as preparing children for the inevitable headache that is the adult world. I think the real problem is that these people have a problem with truth. They don’t want to hear the truth, they just want to hold on to their delusions as though they were reality, but in fact they are just becoming subjects to a system that labels and segregates people into stratified groups in vain efforts to shield youth for the fact that the world isn’t the Disney fairy tale we’ve been absorbing through the television-based culture they’ve been bred into.

Perhaps that is the true issue. More young adults are reading, and so less are watching trashy TV, playing less violent video games. This is causing the stock holders to lose money, so they get articles in the WSJ to convince conservative parents to encourage their children to read less and watch more television.

It may not be censorship to withhold information from a child until it is a certain age, but it is not protection either.

But don’t listen to me, read for yourself and more importantly, think for yourself:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_6

NPR response:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/06/06/137005354/seeing-teenagers-as-we-wish-they-were-the-debate-over-ya-fiction

The Problem

The problem with this great society of ours is that it is too consumer driven. In everyone's attempt to be distinguished from the "working" class, they have gone out and made them selves viable for a service industry that is saturated. So, now with no more service jobs, and very few manual labor jobs, our country, the United States of America, has fallen into what they call a recession, but is much more akin to a Depression.

People in the American society are under the impression that their labors are worth a certain value, and if no one is willing to pay that value then the work is not worth doing. "Give it to the migrant workers," they say. But this attitude is destroying our economy. Combined with a fully automated, mechanized industrial society, our nation has no where to go but down.

The states rely too much on the Federal government to supply them with funds, and the Federal government is too obsessed with keeping the states pacified and dependent to consider mobilizing for successions. What most people don't know is that in the original constitution, it was declared that states should have the right to succeed from the union in the event that they felt no confidence for the federal government. After the Civil War, after the United States strong-armed the confederacy and convinced the rest of the world that the South was a bunch of barbarous red necks looking to enslave people, the constitution was amended to follow that no state could succeed, that the Union was a consolidated entity that could not be divided. The national propaganda has done will to encourage this idea, and bolster the idea that we are the best nation ever. But we're not, and there is nothing to suggest that we are. We are less concerned with doing the right thing, and more concerned with getting revenge. We have our priorities messed up due to our increased interest in individualism, making us selfish and self-centered. We say we want to save the world, but we do not possess the means, nor the ideas to realize such a feat. Instead, we just over-extend our resources in attempts to guard our foreign economic interests.

The sad part is, the government has enough resources to silence free speech such has this, and yet they don't have enough resources to help people like me become more productive members of society. It is sickening to listen to a person who works 10 hours a day and makes over 200 thousand dollars a year talk about how lazy people like me should just work harder and they'd get more. Yeah, compared to those of us who work almost 19 hours a day for minimum wage, and yet we can barely make our ends meet.. we just need to work a little harder. Fuck that. Those kinds of assholes, who can afford to have a healthy percentage cut from their paycheck to be given to those assholes who simply do not have the right circumstances to become self-sufficient in the current state of things.

We are the marginalized middle-class, we are lumped in the category of privileged white people, when our situations determine that we are not-quite-not-white people living in destitution as well as desperation. I'm not saying that we haven't done anything wrong: we didn't need to max out all those credit cards to keep up with affluent white people, nor did we need to go out to eat and party like the other college students do. But we were young and we were dumb, and the system was not set up to protect people like us from hanging ourselves with debt. There are now, but what about all those people who are still caught between the rock and the hard place?

We should be given a FREE pass? no. But the United States government could take more interest in the people who are severely in debt, but possess skills that could be useful. In this way a kind of post-modern indentured servitude can be established where people can begin working on their debt, but also be working for their livelihood.

The problem is laziness and apathy on the part of people who have the most power to change things. They are often misinformed, and make decisions that benefit themselves and no one else. When they think they are helping people, they are usually only doing it in a way that shows them in a better light. Selfish acts of selflessness. There is no altruism.