The Strongest Weapon

With it being Valentine’s Day, and with the local library being named a finalist for the Library of the Year award, it got me thinking about two things that need to be associated with each other more often.

When people talk about attractiveness, about romantic interest, they rarely include that someone is an avid reader. This is a travesty. Nothing is sexier than a gal who reads and reads often. Reading is the backbone of intellect, and intellect is the sexiest thing there is.

Words are strongest thing in the world because they carry meaning. They are the essence of substance, of explaining the world. Without them, without language, we would cease to be able to improve our lives. The old adage “the pen is mightier than the sword” is perhaps a bit cliché, but it is true.

While governments, militaries and dictators may subjugate a people through violence, they can never extinguish the flames of ideology. Conversely, language can reform ideas, change people’s minds and truly affect change—something violence can never do. If violence were stronger than ideology there would be no mass-scale violence to begin with.

Director John Waters put if quiet profanely, and I believe quite elegantly, when he said in order to make reading sexy, if you go home with a person and they don’t own any books, don’t have sex with them.

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