Sail the dreams

Faced with a shooting war in Europe, inflation, rising rates of child poverty and mass shootings every week, Republicans at all levels are concentrating on the real problems: interfering with women getting healthcare, keeping non-cis White people from voting, investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and banning any book containing so much as a whiff of any kind of sexuality you couldn’t discuss at the evangelical potluck picnic.

Yes, it’s not enough that they’re removing any book a single parent complains about in a school library (and sacking teachers who photograph the empty shelves) or defund public libraries that dare to defy their crackpot edicts; now they’re threatening to flat out close these dens of iniquity when banned books are ordered back to the shelves by a judge. (The county backed down. For now.)

These instances, BTW, are all south of the Mason-Dixon Line, unsurprisingly, but there are RWNJs all over and they all got a beef with the 21^st Century. They’re after any institution that could possibly encourage people to think for themselves and explore a world not circumscribed by racism, misogyny and religious bigotry. And—perhaps even more than public schools, public libraries are bulwarks of exploration and critical thinking. Generations of Americans have relied upon public libraries to expand their knowledge and their world—books, periodicals, music, videos, tools, training and more; it's all available at the library.

And that absolutely enrages Republicans. Talk about getting ideas above your station—libraries are the OG.

So today’s National Poetry Month selection is one of Nikki Giovanni’s several poems about these national treasures.

“A Library”
 (for Kelli Martin)

a Library Is:

a place to be free
to be in space
to be in cave times
to be a cook
to be a crook
to be in love
to be unhappy
to be quick and smart
to be contained and cautious
to surf the rainbow
to sail the dreams
to be blue
to be jazz
to be wonderful
to be you
a place to be
yeah… to be