Save the Libraries: Throw the Book(s) at the Mayor

By Colleen O’Connor

How unenlightened can the Mayor’s budget be?

Cut the libraries, the staff, the books, the safety net for children, the local artists’ displays, story times for the pre-schoolers and lots of books and computer access for seniors, students, the homeless, and others who cannot afford the luxury of private ownership.

How is this sanity?

All great cities house a great library. Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève in Paris; Trinity College Library in  Dublin; Real Gabinete Português de Leitura in Rio de Janeiro; National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague; and of course the New York and Seattle Public Libraries.

One of history’s greatest laments, the burning of the ancient world’s single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, remains a mystery.

No such mystery exists about the planned cuts and neglect of San Diego’s libraries.

The Mayor wants to take public monies from the libraries to help fund an expansion of the budgetary black hole called a convention center.

After all, the library’s political clout of does not match that of his donors’. Take the money away from books and ideas and the people in San Diego’s once bustling neighborhoods.

People live in their neighborhoods.  People don’t live in the convention center.  That should be the Mayor’s budgetary priority.

Andrew Carnegie, the father of public library systems, was right, “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.   It is a never-failing spring in the desert.”

What has the City done to the Carnegie legacy?  Cut library hours.  Cut library days.  Cut library staff.  And promise what in return?  Expanding a convention center that never pays for itself.

I am not conflicted in my indignation.  I am, in fact, a great beneficiary of San Diego’s libraries.

As a SDSU student, I often dropped into the USD Law Library to study in its welcoming, then quiet, environs.  (No longer possible)

As a UCSD graduate student, I wandered and wondered at the elegance and grace of that repository of so much history and knowledge, all available to me, a forever lover of learning.

As a post-graduate at the University of Oxford, I reveled in the Bodleian, one of the oldest and most architecturally interesting libraries in Europe, housing over 13 million printed items.

However, one of my most memorable library encounters happened at the Point Loma Hervey Library; a private/public partnership endeavor.

It was in the middle of the Harry Potter craze.  I purchased and read every one of JK Rowling’s fabulous novels.  As did most millennials who now (contrary to popular thought) prefer actual books in hand to computer reading.

So enamored was I, with Pottermania, and the resurgence in reading among the young, that I began to purchase a few boxes of them to give to the library.  I wanted to share something with the youngsters I often saw at the library in after-school hours.

This particular morning, I arrived, before opening hours, with a box full of the latest installment of Potter’s Wizardy to find a young child (probably no more than 8 or 9) sitting on the planter wall outside.

As I approached, he eyed the box as if it contained great treasures.  I don’t now remember if the Harry Potter logo was printed on the box.  But, he did shyly ask what was inside.  I opened the box to reveal the wonderful, freshly printed book covers, that even I had come to admire.

His face lit up as if an apparition appeared.  When I asked if he liked, or had read, any of the series, he reverentially, and quietly responded, “Yes.”

I handed him the top copy to hold and to have.  He did not understand. He gently held the book, stroked the cover as if it were a newborn (which of course, literally speaking, it was), and handed it up to me.

He simply didn’t believe such a joy was his to keep.  Going into the library, to deposit the remainder of the box, I looked back to see him still in awe of his great treasure; a book.  With all the wonders inside.

I often think of him and become even more indignant when this Mayor  (like others before him) wants to cut the library budgets; to restrict access to books for children like this boy. Books in print, books on-line, books on shelves, books yet to be written, in great libraries and great cities.

Worse still, to limit the safe refuge for many children after school.

To which I respond, “Save the Libraries:  Throw the book(s) at the Mayor.”