My favorite comedian, Bill Hicks, had a bit that went a little something like this: he’s on tour in the great American South sitting in a diner, drinking coffee and reading a book. The waitress, a middle-aged woman chewing gum and fighting through her drawl asks him, “Whatchu readin’ for?” Not what are you reading, but what are you reading for. Now, I’m secure enough in my bigotry to admit that joke makes me giggle for a number of reasons, but there’s also a sobering aspect that makes this scenario, presented as a depiction of early 90s America, pertinent to today: literacy and, what I feel is even more important, the desire to read.

Peruse your nearest CIA-sponsored World Factbook, and you’ll see that we’re using the working criteria of “must be over the age of 15, able to read and write” to deem whether someone is literate or not. There’s no fine print explaining the degree of competency required to be considered literate, which, if you’ve spent a week’s time in a classroom on the college level, you’ll realize would be a nice little footnote they could add in, but you’re paying too much attention, reader. Anyway, by the barebones standards of international literacy, the United States of America comes in at 99 percent. We did it!

Now, if you hold that 99 percent up to the list of the top GDPs in the world, you’ll be giddy to see that the USA comes in at our rightful first place atop the countries of the United Nations, and second only to the European Union on the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and CIA Factbook lists. Overall, strong showing for us. This may lead you down the path of correlating literacy and economic success ­— “Reading means the accruement of knowledge, knowledge is power (says Sir Francis Bacon), and in today’s society, the people with money are powerful. Reading leads to money and power!” And then you remember Greece, with their 96 percent literacy rate, and how happy people are with their economic situation.

Maybe these two things are unrelated, and that’s a terrible example, and I’ve lost the argument. That’s okay, because here’s where the propaganda comes in: reading will make you a better — more complete, perhaps not more morally sound  — person. Your reaction to a text, fictional or not, will dictate more important information to you than the text itself; through learning about whatever the text is trying to teach or impart to you, you’re learning about you. How you process information, thoughts and ideas, apply them to your life and then ultimately form your own thoughts and opinions is a penultimate occurrence in the two-way street that the learning experience should be.

Let’s talk about Tom Sawyer, because he’s kind of a jerk. In Twain’s “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” the gratuitous usage of the “n-word” makes it one of the more racially-charged novels that’s considered to be worth any sort of merit and is therefore commonplace in American literature canon. Because of aforementioned racial slurs, sometimes even thrown around by young Tom himself, one of the many themes and topics of debate students often tackle is the question of whether the novel as a whole is racist or not — how you react to the presence of bigotry and racism, how you process and justify to yourself the presence and inclusion of those themes and how you formulate an opinion of the novel based on your conclusions has you meeting the reading process in the middle. And it tells you so much more about that topic, theme, argument, yourself and life than any novel ever could.

This is what we need. We need people taking texts, working their way through them and asking, “What does this mean? What does this mean for me?” If, by my definition, the reading process will result in some form of higher self-awareness, and we have folks running around with knowledge based on not only external sources — books, magazines, the Internet, etc. — but internal ones as well, then we’ve got the chance to live in a society, nationally and internationally, that at the very least can promise itself its decisions are steeped in a consciously-aware effort to seek out what it intellectually and morally aligns itself with.

To reiterate: knowledge is power. Knowledge is accrued through the processing of information imparted on you by some sort of experience; let’s use the novel idea of that experience being reading. While trying to avoid an “America is the best ever” spin on things, let’s acknowledge that we, via our infinite resources in the form of libraries, archives and the Internet, have all of the information ever accrued by our species at our fingertips. We have a responsibility to share that knowledge, to share that power, through emphasizing the importance of and promoting reading and literacy across the world.