[Publib] Needing Librarians

[Backwage at aol.com]

At the present time the nation is engaged in a series of policy debates  
over the future of health care reform.  If you watch the news, you have seen 
politicians convene what are known  as town hall meetings—gatherings of the 
community which are intended to permit  questioning and the expression of 
viewpoints.  Instead of rational discourse, what has  occurred is a series of 
shouting matches and wild demonstrations with occasional  fisticuffs.  Not
hing like genuine  debate, which of course requires two preconditions:  that 
the participant have a genuine  desire to be convinced of another viewpoint, 
and that he arrive in possession of  at least the bare outline of the matter 
at hand. 
It might seem that the asylums of the nation had been  emptied to fill 
these meetings, but your intelligent observer knows  otherwise—that these people 
really are a slice right out of the middle of the  American pie.  You hear 
them talking  on the train and cringe; their sources of information tilt 
toward rumor and the  internet legend.  Obama is going to  kill off old people; 
Obama is going to make insurance free for everybody.  We are headed for 
fascism and socialism,  simultaneously, while also being left completely 
without leadership.   
As librarians you are in for no surprise if you ask these  folks where they 
get their information.  And the folks on the train would be in for a 
surprise if they were told  that they (1) had no idea what they were talking 
about, and (2) that they could  very easily find out the history, current 
prospects and likely outcomes of the  health care debate by visiting their local 
library.   
I am not one of those folks who believes that the  internet is God.  In 
fact, I regard  it as a failure.  The only  previously occurring failure of 
similar magnitude was television, and the  internet is worse.  You see,  
television could have been something other than the “vast wasteland” but that it  
didn’t do better has to do with its owners as much as its consumers.  After 
all, ordinary folk didn’t write  Congress asking for reruns of the Beverly 
Hillbillies any more than they asked  for the original broadcast, and it 
wouldn’t have made much difference anyhow—the  folks at home are only 
responsible for having made such shows an unfortunate  part of our shared heritage.  
 
The internet on the other hand is terrifically varied, in effect millions  
of television channels broadcasting all at once.  Certainly 90% of what is 
there is trash  but the viewer has a choice, and some of the choices are 
superb—far better than  the best stuff of television at any time in its history. 
The sin and crime of the internet comes from the failure  of its users to 
employ the thing to its highest and best uses.  Given a sort of universal 
channel  changer, they stick to the same sort of stuff that appears on 
television.  And consider themselves “informed”  because they spend hours a day 
looking up movie stars’ profiles.   
If you suppose that I consider the average person an idiot, you are  wrong. 
 The average person is  average—by which figuring idiocy is rendered normal 
and commonplace. 
The ordinary person needs a guide to information.  It is not and has not 
ever been true  that most folks will on their own seek out the right way to 
live, the better  sort of entertainments or food worthy of the name.  In fact, 
they will not even bother to  find out whom to vote for.  Though  they 
certainly will vote.  And eat,  and everything else (and with what discernment!) 
The librarian can be a guide, and should be.  At the very least to sources 
of genuine  information, which as we all learned in library school (before 
it became  information science, a science fiction term if ever there was one) 
possess  something called authority.  It is authority they need, and 
authority  we have—in ourselves and in the sound references we can provide. 
Mind you, not very many will approach.  Here we see that the idea of the 
passive  librarian is simply wrong and moreover harmful.  Librarians need to 
advertise their  availability and the strength of their resources.  What 
could be a better remedy for the  current fracas than for a local library to 
advertise itself as the place to find  the answers, the information, the past 
of the whole ball of wax? 
The librarian is the only reliable human guide to the  internet.  The 
librarian is the one  person in town who can dig up print sources.  The librarian 
is, bless her heart,  largely impartial, generally genial, and bound by 
profession to serve.  Who better to dust off  Clinton’s old plan so that it may 
be  compared to Obama’s formulations?   
We gave them the Federalist Papers and the Pentagon Papers and everything  
in between.  We gave them Billy  Mitchell’s reports and John Hersey’s  
Hiroshima.  We can give them health care in all its  hideous and expensive 
complexity.  They are waiting for the truth.  We should be ready to throw it at 
them.   Don’t sit back and wait for the  kids to come by with their term 
papers; don’t let the internet rumor mill  determine the course of debate.  
Maybe they won’t listen—but if they don’t know the truth when the time  comes 
to decide, don’t let it be because your library didn’t point the  way. 
Tomorrow morning, get off your chair and put together something  useful.  
That’s our job, isn’t  it? 
M. McGrorty
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