The Questioning Librarian

A Syrian refugee, photo from the U.N. Refugee Agency I was finishing reading a new book on the Armenian genocide just as the anti-refugee sentiment began its upswing. The actions were different, but the basic instinct behind it--a fear and hatred of those different from ourselves--was the same. Often, our default instinct is to be suspicious, and hostile, towards those who are outside of our group. It's a habit that seems common, but it remains disturbing to see it in action just the same.  Send them back, lock them out, take care of our own first. And those were just the mildest sentiments anyone could hear. There was certainly anti-refugee sentiment before (right-wing groups warned of the President admitting "10,000 Muslims" into the country), but the tenor ratcheted up after the attacks in Paris. The very same people who make a habit of never helping anyone suddenly were overcome with concern for the homeless in our country, for veterans, when before they de...

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...

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...