It’s stunning that we are alive at this time in history, when people are trying to remove all but the blandest books from library shelves. I feel like — like — like, this is “Goodnight Moon,” but the old lady whispering “hush” is whispering it to all of us, and whispering it in a bad, sinister way. And they are treating some people like “goodnight, nobody,” or “goodnight, mush.”

You wish that everybody you met would be like the light, or the red balloon or even the three little bears sitting on chairs in the painting in “Goodnight Moon’s” big green room. But some people are not like that. The world is like the world in “Goodnight Moon,” but if the world were not good but bad. I wish there were a way of describing a world like that more easily.

Nothing like this has ever happened in history before as far as I can tell, and nobody has ever been like this. I am trying to find the words to describe what I see happening all around. It is like if you asked me, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” and what I saw was … bad.

Kathleen Parker: The book-banning crowd is back. Resist them.

To take books away so that people cannot read them — it’s like something out of … “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” but instead of eating leaves and a cake, he is eating books! And instead of getting larger and becoming a butterfly, he is becoming powerful in his local government and school board! And there are more caterpillars like him, and they are trying to make life difficult for lady caterpillars!

What’s happening to women and minorities and different thinkers is like “The Giving Tree,” but in the worst possible way. Picture the cow jumping over the moon, but onto a human face, and forever. If things continue at this rate, the world we live in will be even less like the world in the Paddington Bear series than it is currently. It will be like the world in another book. Maybe? I assume! I haven’t had much chance to read any.