The Questioning Librarian

A few blog posts ago, I wrote about how librarians make a difference in the lives of people they serve, in myriad ways. This qualitative take on the value of libraries doesn't cover the whole picture, however. While that alone would, to my mind, be enough to justify the continued presence of libraries in our communities, the quantitative data that exists that further bolsters our case. Libraries make a difference in the lives of people we serve, and we also make a difference in the economies in which we exist. I was thinking about this more last week after having helped several people in our little library. The first was a man in his forties who was in the process of job searching. As a condition of receiving his unemployment, he visited the library every day, five days a week, to dutifully continue searching for a new job. One day he came to me for help--he needed to attach his resume to an email to send off in applying for a job and didn't know how. I showed him how...

What do presidents as diverse as William McKinley, George W. Bush, Harry Truman and both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common? Each one issued more executive orders than Barack Obama. The chart  from The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is useful in charting both the number, and the frequency, of executive orders both past and present. Two things are quite evident when you start to look at the numbers. The first, interesting as a student of history, is that up until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, fated to be president at the ending of Reconstruction, no president issued more than one hundred executive orders during their time in office. After Chester Arthur, no president has issued fewer than one hundred executive orders, even those who served only a single term.  The second thing looking at the numbers reveals is that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than nearly any president in the last century, wit...

It has been interesting, lately, to see the venomous rage directed by conservatives at the most recent influx of immigrants coming across the border. Fleeing increasingly violent drug wars in Central America, some 57,000 children have recently made the treacherous journey from their home countries, across Mexico and into the United States, overwhelming the Border Patrol and existing facilities. The response of the right has been fairly predictable. Xenophobia and hatred of undocumented immigrants has, after all, been a staple of right-wing politics for quite some time, most recently in the backlash against George W. Bush's attempt at immigration reform. But with this new group of immigrants, the ugly side of conservativism's immigration stance has again come to the fore, with sign-waving protesters and right-wing militias descending on the border, determined to "secure" it, while accusing the President of being soft on immigration at best, of perpetuating some kin...

Normally, I hate the term "personal responsibility." Most of the time the term is thrown out in political dialogue, a rather meaningless weapon conservatives use to batter the poor and further erode the social safety net. Regardless, when the term is taken without its political context, it serves a useful purpose in everyday life. It could be referred to, rather clumsily, as a sort of personal "personal responsibility," a responsibility that applies to our personal lives rather than our politics. It really has two separate connotations, both personal responsibility as applying to our own actions, and also the idea that our lives are the result of the actions we take, and thus we are alternately at fault or worthy of accolades for how our lives turn out. In its most extreme form, advocates of personal responsibility decree that we rise or fall entirely on our own merits and hard work. But this is certainly wrong, contrary to the lived experiences of millions of peop...