Public Libraries
Another Vonnegut today:
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Here in the United States, I suspect many people across the country feel pessimistic about its future, as did many four years ago, and four years before that, and so on until it all began.
One bit of reassurance: our country still has its backbone of largely apolitical institutions and civil servants that will continue, as they always have, “raising the sanity waterline.” Progress is continuous, not discrete, and although elections offer us stories worth telling, they don’t represent everything. History doesn’t just happen top-down on special occasions — so much of it is also bottom-up, taking place day after day, in ways too subtle for us to notice.