2026-04-24 - The Librarians =========================== Yesterday i watched The Librarians, a PBS documentary about present day book banning efforts and the criminalization of librarians. The Librarians (Wikipedia) The Librarians (JS) 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 Tags ==== censorship collapse freedom political video