Today marks the end of Banned Book Week. I feel like in this Age of Information, this should be a quaint celebration of the way we “used to be,” but sadly, the fight to ban books from school libraries has come right to our doorstep in recent weeks.

It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m happy for that fight, because at least that school still has a functioning library.

I expected the usual suspects, but that just goes to show how wrong I was. No “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Fahrenheit 451” here. Not even “Charlotte’s Web,” which I only recently found out was banned due to how the animals’ speaking was portrayed. (Gosh, I hope none of those nuts ever hear me carry on a two-sided conversation with the dogs.)

No, this list was full of today’s headlines, including “Black Lives Matter,” “Sex Trafficking,” “Coming Out As Transgender,” and my personal favorite, “Frequently Asked Questions About Dating.” I examined this list from three perspectives.

First, I thought about myself as a teenager, and where I would be looking for that kind of information. BLM, sex trafficking and transgender issues were simply not on my radar in high school. Now, I know that part of the ridiculous argument about these books is that “20 years ago, we didn’t have (fill in the blank.)” That simply isn’t true.

I met a trans person in college, over 30 years ago, for those of you keeping track. College gave her the freedom to express herself and start to explore becoming the person she knew she’d always been.

Unfortunately, even though we all found ourselves at a reasonably liberal and accepting school in a major urban area, a lot of us didn’t understand what she was going through. I thought by adopting a live-and-let-live attitude, and basically just ignoring her, everything would be fine. It wasn’t, for her, or for the rest of us.

Flash forward 30 years to a trip A took to a world leadership college with his peers in Chicago. Not only did he meet many unique individuals, he had the vocabulary, the awareness and the empathy to listen and understand their stories, and he has become what is known as an ally. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, we knew better, so we did better.

Then, I thought about myself, as a mom to teenagers. Sure, I can see my kids and I having a discussion about sex trafficking. We do every time one of them breaks off from our pack to use the bathroom at the mall. I am glad that we’ve always been able to discuss LGBTQ+ issues openly and matter-of-factly in our family.

However, when it comes to FAQs about dating, I’m pretty sure my children would choose life in a monastery before they’d ever consider having a discussion about their social lives with me. Now, would they ever consider turning to a library book for those answers either? Also, unlikely. They’re probably going to ask their friends, the internet or just wing it. Although this flies in the face of my helicopter-like tendencies, minus the internet, this pretty much describes the dating life of a teenager for decades.

Finally, I thought of myself as the taxpayer, the member of the community, the person who wants well-rounded, open-minded students entering the adult world prepared to deal with it responsibly and maturely. As my Dad was fond of saying, “They’re the ones who are going to be paying my Social Security someday, so we want them to prosper!”

I’ve been a parent long enough to know that the easiest way to get a child to do something is to tell them that they can’t. I wonder how many of these literary works had ever been checked out of the library before making it onto someone’s inflammatory list. I’m going to guess, unless it was related to school assignments, they were not heavily in the rotation.

Also, after seeing a few titles on the list, it took me a few minutes and the internet to find plot summaries or online texts of most of them. Taking books off the shelves isn’t quite the power move that it used to be. I also know that our kids probably know way more about most of the subjects on that list already than we’d like to imagine.

What I have to hope is that they’ve been taught the critical thinking skills to understand this information, to recognize bad information when it’s in front of them, and how to find good information when it’s needed. It’s disheartening to find out that those most vocal about removing books frequently haven’t actually read the books.

Historically, book banning hasn’t ever worked out well for those that would ban.

Frequently, those works that are most controversial tend to become the classics that later generations still read when the mindless word vomit has long gone by the wayside. Civilization is a place in time, and often, it is the academics and the creatives who can visualize a better world for all of us.

If nothing else comes out of all of this, the would-be banners have at least drawn attention to and given a voice to books that might have otherwise sat on shelves untouched for years. Sure, many may speak about them with disgust or revulsion. But if even a few people take the time to read them, or even talk about them, and the subjects they contain in a positive, educational manner, well, maybe the battle isn’t entirely lost.

Life With Liz is published on Saturdays in the Times News.