In case you haven’t noticed—which is probably impossible, since I’ve seen it mentioned everywhere recently—it’s Banned Books Week. This is the week that the American Library Association has chosen to spotlight the ridiculous existence of banned and challenged books.It’s rather hard to believe that people are still challenging books. There are celebrities known for their sex tapes, football players known for their arrest records, and 75% of high school students in Oklahoma can’t name the first president of the United States. (Not many books read among those three groups, are there?)So how is anyone shocked or offended by something in a book?Yet the effort to ban certain books continues. The American Library Association has an Office for Intellectual Freedom that tallies the effort to ban books. Yahoos who want to ban books attempt to do so for a variety of reasons. Here’s a small sample of their book-banning justifications: offensive language, violence, sexual explicitness, religious viewpoint, homosexuality, Occult/Satanism, and political viewpoint.The book with the most attempts to ban it last year? Captain Underpants, for offensive language, because it’s unsuited for its age group, and violence. Maybe they should put a sticker on it that says “Not intended for adults!” At least that might take care of the “unsuited for age group” problem.I suppose there will always be some narrow-minded people who think we’ll be better off if we ban certain books. And thought they might mean well, there’s no doubt they’re narrow-minded.There are plenty of people who will make the case against banning books. I don’t need to do that, and, since you’re so stinking smart (I mean you are reading this blog after all!) hopefully you don’t need me to do that.Instead, I’ll suggest that we should strive to be like the banned books.People try to ban books because the books make them uncomfortable, or they depict things that they’re not used to reading about, or they contain ideas that they don’t like.We should strive to be like that.It’s easy to go along with the crowd, and think like everyone else, and never do anything that will rock the boat. But we have enough people who do that already.Better that we propose new ideas, or challenge authority, or question the reasoning behind something, and then watch as things improve, both for us and for society. The only way to progress is to challenge what’s already there, and that’s what these books do. That’s why some people are scared of them.Since you’re so smart, you’re probably wondering, “Why would I want to be like Captain Underpants?” or “What greatness has come from Captain Underpants?”Captain Underpants is a series of children’s books, in which the adults usually play the fool. And there’s nothing more entertaining to children than when they’re right and the adults are wrong. The adults cause the problems and the children have the solutions. So obviously children are going to be entertained and enjoy reading these stories.But perhaps they’re more than entertainment. If a kid reads Captain Underpants and sees that sometimes the kids are right and the adults are wrong, then maybe they’ll realize that people in authority aren’t always right. And maybe they’ll begin to ask questions about other things. And there’s nothing more valuable to a person or to society than asking questions.We should strive to ask questions. We should strive to try new things. We should strive to challenge those who provide answers like, “That’s just the way things are,” or “It will never change,” or, even more dangerously, “You can’t do that.”People try to ban books because they ask questions. Maybe those questions aren’t explicit, but they’re there. And when we read them, we ask questions. And when we ask questions, we change. We progress. We’re happier. We’re smarter. The world becomes better.So the irony of banned books is that the people banning the books think they have all the answers, but really what they want is for us to not even ask the questions.By the way, if you like what you're reading here, you should like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes.You should subscribe to this blog, don't you think? That way you'll never forget to come back. Forgetting is bad. So why don't you just type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. I'm not going to send you a bunch of junk, and you can ditch me any time you want.