National Friends of Libraries Week: Does That Include You?

This is National Friends of Libraries Week. I thought I'd point that out.

Someone is always declaring some kind of National Something or Other Week or Day, so if the above declaration doesn't impress you, you can scarcely be blamed. But right now, in this atmosphere, it might be especially vital to know that.

Libraries are under attack nowadays because their contents aren't always flavored vanilla. They don't always adhere to someone else's morals and ethics; indeed, they spend significant time questioning, if not directly opposing, what those morals and ethics are. But that's the point: Those authors aren't blindly shuffling forward, like zombies, in a world where nothing is doubted, nothing is challenged. 

Your mind can close itself off with certain truths that agree with your world view, with your preferences. But that's the wrong approach. Truth today, as many historians can tell you, isn't necessarily the whole truth of tomorrow. The relentless job of research and its documentation in things like books is to continue to unearth, and add onto if not actually refute, those truths we've comfortably come to accept and burn into our brains. One set of facts, as we understand them, allows us, even requires us, to ask questions about what might come next.

Neither does that rule out those who deal in fiction, the novelists who imagine worlds and circumstances that could be, that could happen, to inspire others to do the same. Not only isn't this a bad idea, it's one of the best: It was Einstein, after all, who said "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

The two are intertwined. One leads to the other. I wish that for our sake, Einstein would have added the word "even" to put between "is" and "more," to make it read, "Imagination is even more important than knowledge," to emphasize the inextricable link. But he was dealing in physics, where the quest for truth inspires more and more and more. I'm not sure he thought he had to add that little word. I wonder what he would think today, now that some people find truth more threatening than ever, now that they grasp it for the first time.

That quest has been getting people in trouble for centuries. But it has the same basis upon which people are trying to take out new information now--religion. Religion can be a good thing, guiding us toward personal peace and goodness, but it can also pull us toward darkness and the sin of suppression disguised as protection against evil, or what someone calls evil. 

Stopping the spread of knowledge isn't stopping the work of the devil, it's doing that work. It's preventing us from fulfilling the expansion of our minds, the major advantage we have from the lower primates.

It's all based on fear--fear that we might learn something that will help us do something else that someone doesn't like. Ignorance accomplishes that far better than excess or additional knowledge. And that is based on a negative viewpoint of human nature, that left alone, we are inclined to do bad things, not good. We need controls, not additional freedom.

Judge that as you will. The real trouble comes when someone takes away someone else's rights due to moral evaluations they have no right to act upon. Not doing something that you think is wrong doesn't mean you can, must and have the right to do the same to someone else who doesn't think so. So if you don't think abortion is right, don't have one. If you don't think a certain book or books should be in the library, don't read them, don't look through them, don't think about them.

I've just learned that the EveryLibrary Institute, a public policy think tank for libraries, and Book Riot, the largest independent editorial book site in North American, announced the results of a recent survey about perceptions of public libraries and the issues they currently face. Over 850 parents with children under 18 were asked in September to share their views. Some of the top findings:

• 67% agreed or somewhat agreed that "banning books is a waste of time";
• 74% agreed or somewhat agreed that book bans infringe on their right to make decisions for their children;
• 92% said their children are safe at the library;
• 57% said that reading opens children to new ideas, new people, and new perspectives; and
• 44% said that teens should have access to books on controversial subjects and themes

It's that last statistic that bothers me. What constitutes "controversial"? Is that word a dog whistle for LGBTQ+ topics and trans-student issues? Or does it also include anything regarding sexual behavior, hetero- or homosexual? If so, that's the conversation we should be having. Kids need to know about sex. They surely should know more than our generation did. We'd like to think parents will be talking to them about it, but what information will they be imparting to them? We'd like to think it will be accurate, but what if it's based only on their own experiences, and not on science? Wouldn't that have the potential to do more damage instead of being helpful?

All of it leads to this ongoing question: What would hurt to have more information available about anything and everything, as long as it's accurate? What would it hurt to read about other people's experiences?

Sex isn't the only "controversial" place a library can go. There is still denial among people who don't think climate change is really happening. If you take "controversial" books about sex away, what about that, too? What if Greta Thunberg's library had had  no sources on that subject?

So, too, with race. White supremacy isn't fading from view, unfortunately. We need more works on racial mixing and harmony. Banning Ta Nehisi Coates sounds ridiculous, but to some it may not be. Closing minds about one thing makes it all that much easier to justify closing them to others that one may not have foreseen.

So if you haven't visited your public library in a while, this week wouldn't be a bad time to do that. I don't live in Shorewood, the border of which is just a few blocks north, but I've been allowed to join the board of the Friends of the Shorewood Public Library (the Advocacy Chair of which, Mary Armstrong, compiled the above stats, so kudos to her). Nobody's attacked that library yet--at least, not that I know of--but I want to be there to defend it if they do. I'm going to defend the right of information, the lifeblood of democracy, which dovetails with the right to read. 

It's another thing that we like to take for granted, but in today's excessively contentious society, we can't do that anymore. Should we turn our backs on it, it will be gone one day, and our lives will mean that much less. I can't change the world--tried that, didn't work--but for that little part of it, I'll be around to stand guard for people's freedoms and liberties. 

Happy National Friends of Libraries Week. Take out a book and enjoy it.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark