The Questioning Librarian

Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act which proved to be the spark that set off the First World War. Four years of pointless, mechanized slaughter followed, in which over 65 million people died. The history of our civilization is rife with useless wars that accomplished next to nothing, but the First World War must surely rank as one of the most pointless conflicts we've ever engaged in. Worse than that, the conflict continues to affect our world in ways both numerous and negative.  A crowd in London celebrate's Britain's declaration of war, 1914 Humanity seems to need little pretext to start to kill one another. We go to war over reasons both large and small, petty in both senses of the word. We battle each other over resources, territory, because our neighbors are a different ethnicity than us, because we quibble over the precise interpretation of a religious text, because we have a divine mand...

When I went to my book club last week, I was looking forward to discussing the Anita Shreve novel that had been selected, a book that was interestingly written even if the story itself was a little dull for me. The way our book club is set up is that each of us takes a turn talking about what we thought about the book and got out of it, and with the diversity of people there, ranging from a retired German teacher, an old Presbyterian minister, to a local artist, the discussion is always interesting. But what was most striking for me this time was the response to the book from a member of the group who spoke very little about the novel itself. Instead, he talked about how when he lived in California he walked several miles to the library to take out books, how he treasured them, how a handful of books that he had taken out of the library changed his life. It really turned out to be a profound mediation on the power of books to alter a life in the most surprising ways.  Where I ...

Some days, I find it hard to feel that humans are essentially good. Most people must experience this feeling, I think, especially if they work with the public. It is easy to slip into a permanent state of mind, wherein humans are only to be viewed through the lens of our worst qualities. Certainly there is enough fodder to fuel this; we are driven by greed, by malice and hatred towards our fellow human beings, both ones we know and ones we don't, people who are different from us. We destroy ancient forests for a few dollars, we kill each other over absolute pettiness, like whether or not the communion wafer literally becomes the body of Christ, or the fact that our skin is a different color. The litany of the crimes we've committed against each other is long and never ceases to grow. Our history as a civilization is littered with purges and pogroms, assassinations and Terrors, and that doesn't even begin to cover what we've done to other species, blithely sending thous...

A few days ago I read with some level of interest that the anti-gay American Family Association is asking its members to refuse to either use or accept mail with the new Harvey Milk stamps, honoring this country's first openly gay elected official. The abject pettiness of this should be obvious to anyone, but I find it strangely encouraging.  This incident seems to represent the current state of the anti-gay movement in this country; having been losing every major battle for the past two years, they are reduced to bickering over stamps. A hollowed-out movement, the organized, anti-gay bigots of this country, while still strong enough to, disturbingly, block important legislation like anti-bullying because it might just encourage people to be nice to gay students, are increasingly on the defensive. They are a movement that is loud and belligerent (the faux online encyclopedia "Conservapedia", for instance, refers to Milk as a sexual predator), protesting the rise of mar...