The Public Library

One of the things in the USA for which I am most grateful is the local public library system. The main location that I use in downtown Dayton has this “new book shelf” that sometimes seems to me to be the best connection I have to the world.

Dayton Municipal Library

A public library is a socialist arrangement and yet the “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” and the “you're-on-your-own” people here clearly feel uncomfortable in trying to destroy it. There was a $187 million bond issue to improve and expand the downtown library on the ballot recently that was approved 2 to 1, despite tight-lipped, articulate arguments as to how people who don't borrow books shouldn't have to pay and those that do borrow should pay the whole cost.

I happened to be living in the U.K. at the time of Maggie Thatcher's flourishing and fall, when many public libraries were starved and drowned in the bathtub, as the phrase has it. I remember there was almost the smell of death around my little local library in southeast London when it shut down and there was actually dancing in the corridors of the school where I was working when Thatcher was finally ousted.

It is obvious that our whole literary heritage, as well as our language itself, is a gift to us from people in the past who created it, worked it out with others before and around them. The “you're-on-your-own” “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” approach clearly does not correspond to how the world works. It also feels so sad and selfish. There are times, yes, when love is abused by the selfish, but that it no way means that we should become the very thing we hate. That is a basic component of what happened during the Reagan-Thatcher years.