I try not to judge people too much these days, because Lord knows I’m not a saint. But I’ll never understand why some folks don’t like to read. Reading saved my life.

I started early — books, magazines, newspapers — anything I could get my hands on. If it had words on it, I was in it.

Was I teased as a child for being a bookworm? Of course. But I didn’t give a fuck. Reading is why I scored at a 12th-grade vocabulary level in the 6th grade.

Over the years, I’ve been watching what I see as the erosion of democracy in America, and to my eye it’s tightly braided with anti-intellectualism — a suspicion of learning, expertise, and critical thought. When curiosity gets treated like a character flaw and ignorance gets worn like a badge, the civic machinery starts throwing sparks.

A loud slice of the country is willfully ignorant— not incapable, but uninterested. History gets shrugged off. Nuance gets booed off the stage. Complex problems get squeezed into bumper-sticker slogans. That kind of mental diet leaves people easy to mislead and easier to rile up. Gullibility becomes a political resource. Meanness becomes a performance sport.

Democracy is not powered by vibes and volume. It runs on literacy, memory, skepticism, and the stubborn habit of checking receipts. A self-governing society asks regular people to do something heroic and unglamorous: think. Read. Compare sources. Change their minds when evidence demands it.

When thinking is mocked, books are treated like contraband, and expertise is waved away as elitism, the ground gets soft under everyone’s feet — including the folks doing the stomping. Civilization is a group project, and too many people are trying to pass without doing the reading.

But not I.

Last year I came to the conclusion that as long as I’m alive and can still see, I’m going to keep buying books. There will always be something left for me to learn, some new corner of life to understand a little better. I will never be able to stop learning. Thinking.

I will never become one of the walking dead. As long as my eyes work and my hands can turn a page, I’ll be in conversation with writers, thinkers, historians, dreamers, and truth-tellers. Learning is not a phase of my life. It’s the lifestyle.