Happy National Library Week, Love Little Miss Crabby Pants

National Library Week is this week, April 6-12, and after 26 years in my chosen profession, it's the first National Library Week where I'm feeling some kind of way. The timing is particularly brutal, with the current federal administration having gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services on March 31, putting the entire staff of 70 people on "administrative leave." (Note: there are over 9000 public libraries in the United States and this agency also covers museums and other types of libraries - if anything they're grossly understaffed and underfunded with 70 employees).  IMLS funnels grant money to State Libraries, which fund everything from summer reading programs, educational databases, InterLibrary Loan services, access to eBooks and downloadable audiobooks, and a variety of special programs including services to the blind and disabled. 

This will end up playing out in the courts (21 states have already filed suit at the time of this blog post), but even if IMLS is restored, y'all we are in for a long haul where librarians are hobbling down the road already having shot ourselves, repeatedly and gleefully, in both feet for the past 25+ years (at least...).

I started on the path of my professional career as the Internet was becoming a more widely available "thing." As our world has gone digital, there's been a push for libraries to market themselves as being "relevant" in the digital landscape. Couple this with the complete erosion of public services and suddenly libraries are where you go to file your taxes, navigate and apply for assistance, learn a new job skill, earn your high school diploma, etc. While government uncut and eroded public programs, libraries stepped in to become the defacto social safety net and by extension address the digital divide - because we want to help our communities. We want to enrich lives. We want people to be and do better. Did we get additional funding to support our altruistic mission? Of course not. Our governing bodies told us to figure it out - do more with less. Which sad to say, libraries got so good at doing it's now just expected.

As we took on all these things, we undercut our central mission and we happily did this by crowing about our relevance in a newfound digital world, thinking this would somehow translate into better funding (ha ha ha ha!). Libraries Are More Than Books!  Why were we so quick to adopt this slogan? Because books are old news and like all things old, are seen as not sexy nor cutting edge. Tutoring, job programs, homeless services, educational opportunities, career advancement - all sexy. Certainly libraries have been offering these things for nearly as long as we've been offering books, but you can cloak it in 21st century marketing slogans, give it a new haircut and slap on some lipstick and voila! Sexy. These are the kinds of "innovative services" that win libraries and librarians awards. It gets you a pat on the back.  It has not, however, opened up long term sustainable funding - which means libraries rely on grants and fundraising to make most of this magic happen.

More than ever, I'm here to beg my fellow librarians that Books Are Sexy. Reading, in all its forms, is Sexy AF. The children in this country still have not gained back the reading and math loses from the pandemic and the longer this goes on the further behind the eight ball future generations are going to be. I'm thinking libraries crowing about being More Than Books is not the flex everyone thinks it is, especially when the current political climate is to shackle and hobble museums and libraries as much as possible, if not outright shutter them completely.  Why? Yes, because of the programs that look to narrow inequities in our communities, but also because of books.  You know, the redheaded stepchild we consistently throw under the bus in favor of sexier and shinier innovations.

Look, some might think it's glib or trite, but libraries expose people to a world outside of the tiny bubble they inhabit.  Yes, that can happen through programming and special services, which not everyone in your community is going to take part in (they just aren't).  But picking up a book only requires the ability to read or listen, and when they do, they're transported outside of their own bubble. Books can be a window, a view to another world and when an author is doing their job I'm going to have some sort of emotional response to the people in those books (whether they're fictional or not). They may or may not look or think like me. They could have similar experiences to me or not. They could live in a part of world I'm familiar with, or not. If the author is doing their job, for me at any rate, they're eliciting an emotional response. I may love these people or hate them, but one thing is for certain - I've gotten to know them. I know there are people out there who aren't like me (or maybe they are in either small or big ways) and you know what? That doesn't have to be scary. Sometimes different is just different - neither good nor bad, just different.

Books open up the outside world. They indirectly, and sneakily, teach us empathy and compassion. And y'all, in the current news cycle that's Rockstar Level Sexy.  Like Mick Jagger or Tina Turner strutting across the stage damn sexy. And it's why they want to undercut libraries even more than they've been undercut already and limit access to books. They're specifically targeting books featuring marginalized characters and communities because if we read about people different from us, and realize they aren't scary, that they aren't "the problem," then we open up our eyes to who really is the problem - the folks who want to distract us into hating each other so they can pull off the long con power/money grab and keep us all in our comfortable, clueless bubbles.

A book isn't going to turn your kid into anything other than possibly empathetic and compassionate (and sadly this is not a foregone conclusion - you can lead horses to water, but you can't always make them drink). As a kid I read books about cancer patients, aliens, anorexics, drug addicts, murderers, poor people, rich people, black people, brown people, gay people and straight people and those books didn't magically turn me into something I wasn't already. If I read a book about jumping off a bridge, it didn't mean I was going to. What those books did teach me though, and hopefully will teach kids today is that black, brown, gay, trans, straight, homeless, whomever are people too. Just like they're a person. That they have feelings, dreams and ambitions - just like they do. At the end of the day, under the skin, we're all people. And if you think that's radical or the Pejorative Woke, I weep for you.

Look, I've been in the service industry a long time and I worked fast food before I earned my library degree (y'all I have stories). I'm not so much a Pollyanna that I think everybody is sunshine, roses and lollypops. Some people truly are sad, miserly, awful people that will test what small measure of goodwill I've somehow managed to hang on to. But I truly believe, deep down, that most people are capable of good things. Look some folks are beyond helping and some folks are just plain evil to the bone. Social media seems to have embedded into us the idea that none of us can ever be wrong (trust me, we can all be wrong). What I hope is that we can do better and I think the way to do that is to somehow instill the idea that empathy and compassion aren't a cancer that needs to be eradicated. Libraries do that. We have been doing that since the dawn of our existence, yes with books. Protecting the stories makes us targets, but if we can protect the stories (and by extension, their creators), they just might save us.  Crowing that libraries are more than books will never be the flex some librarians think it is, if anything they're doing more harm than good. It's past time we realized that.