The Library Fix
When politics gets mean and dumb, you can cheer yourself up by walking into a public library.
By Garrison Keillor
"When politics gets mean and dumb, you can cheer yourself up by walking into a public library, one of the nobler expressions of democracy. Candidates don't mention libraries -- they're more likely to talk about putting people behind bars and no coddling or shilly-shallying with appeals and that judicial nonsense, just throw them in the dungeon and stick their heads in the toilet and do what you gotta do -- and yet when I walk into the library near my house and see a couple hundred teenagers studying, most of them Hmong or Vietnamese, I see the old cheerful America that Washington has lost touch with, the land of opportunity.
The library is the temple of freedom. Growing up, we kids were aware of how much of our lives was a performance for adults. In school, at church, in Scouts, adults were watching, cueing you, coaching, encouraging, commenting; but in the library, you didn't have to perform for the librarian. She simply presided over an orderly world in which you had the freedom of your own imagination. The silence was not repressive but liberating: to allow your imagination to play, uninhibited by others."
Read the entire article at Salon.com.
What role does the library serve for you?
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1 comment:
Garrison, must have had better or maybe "free" time in a library than I did as a child. We would go to town on Saturday morning: 1. go to the library to get and return books, then leave. 2. my sister and I would go for piano lessons while my mother got her hair done. 3. go to the A&P where we would buy groceries ($10.00 would get us two large brown sacks full). Then we would go home and clean house. This went on for years!
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