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...

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...

For anyone who has watched the contentious debate within the Boy Scouts as to whether or not the organization should refrain from forcing out gay scouts, seeing a bigot backlash is not exactly surprising. After all, there were numerous threats from some that they would  leave the Scouts rather than serve alongside gays. And now, we can see the first stirrings as some move toward the exit. One father has already detailed his plans to withdraw his son from the Scouts . Shamelessly, he blames the Scouts, rather than his own intolerance and prejudice, for his son's subsequent tears. Perhaps even less surprising is the move by Southern Baptists to cut ties entirely to the organization, so outraged are they by the Scouts' belated, half-hearted decision to be tolerant of those who are different from them. The Baptists are having none of this, moving to vote on a resolution to urge member congregations to sever ties, a resolution that members emphasize is non-binding but may wel...

On this blog, I generally spend time railing against the demonstrable idiocies of the young-earth creationists, but this is in no way to say that anti-evolution sentiment is the only form of unreason that is running about. No, there are many other forms that irrationality takes, from those I've touched on in this blog (the anti-vaccine movement) to those I haven't (birthers, UFO enthusiasts). Some of these forms of irrationality are rather harmless, like the old belief that Elvis wasn't actually dead, but some ideas which are quite unreasonable are not harmless at all. The anti-vaccine movement actively endangers the health of the public, and the creationists retard science education. But one other has been bothering me for some time, a topic that was easier left alone while criticism was levied against groups like the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis. The topic is, as you may have guessed, gay marriage and the LGBTQ rights movement--or rather the opposition to t...

In Mansfield, Texas, the school district won a grant to teach Arabic classes. Originally labeled as mandatory, the district has since backed down, dissembling that they are not, in fact, mandatory. Still, parent remain "concerned" that their children might be exposed to a language other than English. They fear that learning Arabic might somehow transform their children into Koran-reading Muslims; it's a marker of that fear that the district has made clear that teaching Arabic does not involve religious training. The upset parents said that they should have been told months ago about the grant, to what end I'm not quite sure. Bigotry is on parade here, the irrational fear of the "Other." America needs translators of Arabic, and also Mandarin Chinese, now more than it ever has, and such people are exactly what it does not have. If this country ceases to be great, it will be because of unfounded fears like this in Mansfield. We should not stop the important...