Gratitude Monday: libraries

If an educated electorate is the foundation of democracy, then public libraries are the infrastructure that supports that foundation. Libraries are a wellspring of ideas—all kinds of ideas, from all kinds of sources—and we need all the ideas to keep the rivers of government fresh as they flow through the decades.

These days, in addition to books, movies and magazines, you can go to your public library to borrow tools for gardening or cookery, to attend workshops on home improvement or lectures on penguins of the Antarctic. You can pick up COVID tests and use computers to access the Internet or do some writing. (Fun fact: for nine days in 1952, Ray Bradbury used the pre-PC equivalent, typewriters in UCLA’s Powell Library, to write Fahrenheit 451, at the rate of ten cents per half hour.)

I love libraries—pretty much the first thing I do whenever I move to a new place is get a library card from the local one(s) and start wallowing in ideas. I’ve got cards from libraries in seven states and two foreign countries. I love exploring the shelves and knowing that I can check out any book I want to read at home. Pre-YouTube, library books were how I learned to cook, garden and do home repairs. They took me around the world and out of the world; made me think, comforted me when I was distraught, consoled me when I was broken. And all for free (unless you count taxes, in which case it's some of the best use of my money ever).

And librarians have quietly defended our freedoms by doing their jobs since forever. Until this past year, the most recent case was post-9/11, when the Bush administration demanded that libraries cough up patrons’ borrowing histories. Across the country, librarians told the feds to get stuffed. In some cases they rejigged their IT systems so that the instant a book or other material was checked in, it was expunged from the patron’s record.

But now we’re in the post-Kleptocrat era, so there’s this:

You know libraries are vital to democracy because so many right-wing nut jobs have started screaming about how ideas are polluting our youth—ideas like history, science, love, ethics and the like. And they’ve started banning them; banning and, in some cases, burning books.

Just one example: the jumped-up pissant mayor of the backwater Mississippi town of Ridgeland, demanded that the Madison County, Miss., library purge its shelves of all LGBTQ+ materials. The library told him to pound sand. So he withheld $110,000 of library funds in punishment. I found out about it via a Twitter post by a member of the furry community and this story in Vice. Here’s the thing—the library started a fundraiser to try to offset the pissant’s most-likely illegal move. The original goal was $2500. The furry community kicked in, and the fundraiser blew way past that amount. By the time I ponied up $50, we were into the five figures. At time of this writing, it’s reached $87,920. But you have until Valentine’s Day to kick in a few bucks. Just go to this URL and you can strike a blow for ideas.

This Gratitude Monday seems like a good time for me to re-up my thanks for all the public libraries and all the librarians and staff who ensure the freedom of ideas. Our lives would be so much poorer without them.