Libraries and democracy

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By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Libraries are the great equalizer in America. Not everyone can afford to buy a book or a computer, but almost everyone can afford to go to the library.

Libraries are the cornerstone of democracy. Free access to information is what democracy depends on in order to have an intelligent population.

Thomas Jefferson famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Books, libraries, TV, radios, the Internet can be added to Jefferson’s newspapers.

What happens in a country without libraries? People don’t know anything.

I’ve lived and worked in El Salvador, Thailand and Romania, countries with ruling juntas, monarchs, or hopelessly corrupt shadow governments, countries with woefully inadequate libraries or no libraries.

People talk about the horrifying poverty in third world countries but it’s not the poverty that’s scary, it’s the lack of informed talking and thinking. In oppressed places, you would ask someone what they thought about something and get a blank stare. They had never thought about this ever and were not about to start: thinking could lead to speaking and speaking could get you killed.

If you think libraries will always be here, think again. We’ve gone from good roads to pot-holed roads in little more than a decade. Remove the funding from anything, and you usher in deterioration.

Abraham Lincoln, a self-educated man, passed the law exam with nothing but books. A friend wanted to know how to do the same thing. Lincoln said, “Get the books and read them. Your ability to read and comprehend is the same in all places.”

Leaders who want to control their people take the censorship of information seriously. In Thailand in 2015, according to an article in Time, a man was sentenced to 40 years in prison for saying something bad about the king’s dog. Thailand has no public libraries.

I was teaching in El Salvador during 9/11. The next day a sweet student brought me a note from her mother, to help me cope, I suppose. It was a 500-year-old prophecy from Nostradamus: “In the city of gold there will be a great thunder, two brothers (Twin Towers) torn apart by chaos.” I’m thinking, this is what there is to help me comprehend?

El Salvador has no public libraries. The lack of information meant that you could never know what was happening.

All the great people in America — statesmen, inventors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, writers, musicians: Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln, Leonard Peltier, Steve Jobs, Woodie Guthrie — could only have become great in a place where there’s free and easy access to information, often in libraries.

Libraries are us. Libraries are America. Let’s not forget who we have been, who we are. Let’s keep our libraries strong. They are necessary to the maintenance of equality and freedom.