# 2026-04-24 - The Librarians
       
       Yesterday i watched The Librarians [1] [2], a PBS documentary about
       present day book banning efforts and the criminalization of
       librarians.
       
       It seemed to me that most of the documentary focused on school
       librarians.  For me, the most disturbing scene was footage of a book
       burning bonfire in Tennessee in 2022, recorded on a phone, where a
       kid was asking his mother for books so he could throw them on the
       fire too.
       
       This is a historic time in the USA where book banning is happening at
       a scale never seen before.  History shows a clear correlation between
       burning books and then eventually burning people.  There are many
       instances of this dynamic recorded in history from modern to ancient
       times, and on multiple continents.
       
       Most of my thoughts on the topic are cynical.
       
       These days i feel old enough that i can accept a role where i cheer
       on the young people who are fighting the good fight.  I do not have
       to fight it myself.
       
       Around the time of the civil war, the USA began measuring illiteracy
       at a national level.  Literacy peaked in the 1970's, and illiteracy
       is currently at the highest level ever measured in this nation's
       history.  In this context, book banning is largely symbolic.
       
       I saw a new elementary school constructed on River Road in Eugene.
       The architecture disturbed me.  It looked a lot like a prison, right
       down to the bars on the windows.
       
       When i ponder a hypothetical school library of highly sanitized,
       soulless books that imprisoned children don't want to read anyway,
       i see book banning as a symptom, not the disease itself.
       
       Kids who want to something alive, fresh, and inspiring, will
       naturally look elsewhere.  Things may get rough for a while, but
       there is a way out.  Human nature cannot build any walls that it
       can't also break down. 
       
       tags:   censorship,collapse,freedom,political,video
       
       # Footnotes
       
  HTML [1] The Librarians (JS)
       
  TEXT [2] The Librarians (Wikipedia)
       
       # Tags
       
   DIR censorship
   DIR collapse
   DIR freedom
   DIR political
   DIR video