The Furious Spinner

Well, I fell off the wagon today. I had to work most of the day, and when I got home, I was tired. A little bit weepy, too. Because of space and budget constraints, the thing I've worked at for over a decade is getting gutted. I believe very strongly in public libraries. I believe in their ability to help lift people out of poverty and ignorance. I believe in their ability to inspire people by their very existence. You can go to a public library and walk away with stories. With dreams. With hope.

It sounds corny, but I've seen it happen, many times. I remember once this boy coming into the small library where I was librarian. He was maybe 10 years old. Perhaps older, because he was small. He had straw-colored hair and big dark eyes, and he wore a black leather jacket. He looked like a tough little boy. I asked him if I could help him find something. He said he liked Stephen King, could I find him someone else like that since he had read most of his? We sat on the floor in the juvenile section of the library and began talking. His eyes lit up as he described the characters in a particular Stephen King book—I can't remember which one. He read late at night in his small room, while the TV was on in the other room and his father and friends sat around the kitchen table playing cards and getting drunk. "King really shows how people feel," he said. I mentioned a few other writers who wrote horror: Peter Straub, John Saul, F. Paul Wilson. I even threw in the names of some juvenile writers. He had tried some of them, liked some, didn't care for others. He was so articulate, so soft-spoken as we sat on the floor together talking, as he described how the stories took him to places he could not get to on his own. When we finished talking, he left the library with more stories.

I see our country spending billions to kill while public services are getting gutted. Not that I can blame the federal government directly for the lack of space and funding at our district library...

So I came home tired and discouraged and I turned on the TV. Yep. I've barely seen TV since we left on our trip to AZ. I watched about five minutes of CNN before I became so angry I wanted to put a chair through the TV. I started to phone CNN. Instead, I turned the TV off. Paula Zahn is so clearly biased in all her reporting. She snarled at Ward Churchill, the man who said what many people have been saying for years: as a nation we are culpable for what happened on 9/11. Some of the people who worked in the Pentagon and the Towers knew that the work they did was not for the greater good. That doesn't mean they deserved to be killed. I applaud him for saying it, even if I don't agree with it all. And frankly, I don't know if I agree or disagree with what he has said because I haven't read or heard enough of his views. It doesn't matter. He has a right to say it. The "right" is comparing his speech to hate speech. They say he is helping the terrorists. What bullshit. (For one thing, this whole thing about hate speech is troubling. Don't hate speech laws violate the first amendment? I've always wondered about that. When they first starting enacting these laws, I thought, well, I don't like people saying those things, but by making some speech illegal aren't we starting down that slippery slope?) Most people don't seem to understand free speech. The speech we need to protect is the speech we hate the most, because next time it's gonna be my speech that needs protecting.

The rest of the stuff on TV was all about celebrities. Geez Louise. I could not possibly care who is married to whom—unless I'm related to them or they are friends of mine. Who cares what outfit, lipstick, bag, or shoes an actress wears? Years from now—if our biosphere survives and people are still wanderings about—our descendants are going to look back at this time and wonder, "Why the fuck were all these people fiddling when the entire planet was burning?" We are a country of consumptive fiddling Neros.

OK, breathe. Not all of us are Neros. Mustn't generalize. Let's do something positive this moment. Like what? Go out and hug someone. I hugged lots of people today. Felt good. Oh, there's my husband. I think I'll go hug him...

...and I'll jump back on that wagon. No more MSM. (It's sun-powered, this wagon, so I ain't polluting or depleting our natural resources.)

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