A Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor has a great column on public libraries as an antidote to the ongoing frustrations of politics as usual.  Here’s a short excerpt…read the whole article here. 

“…When politics gets mean and dumb, you can cheer yourself up by walking into a public library, one of the nobler expressions of democracy…when I walk into the library near my house and see a couple hundred teenagers studying, most of them Hmong or Vietnamese, I see the old cheerful America that Washington has lost touch with, the land of opportunity…The library is the temple of freedom. Growing up, we kids were aware of how much of our lives was a performance for adults. In school, at church, in Scouts, adults were watching, cueing you, coaching, encouraging, commenting; but in the library, you didn’t have to perform for the librarian. She simply presided over an orderly world in which you had the freedom of your own imagination. The silence was not repressive but liberating: to allow your imagination to play, uninhibited by others…

Libraries have rushed forward into the new age (whichever one we’re in now), and the word “librarian” is out. They’re Information Professionals now, and it’s a Media Resource Center, and it’s wired to the max. Just as we novelists have become experiential document specialists producing sensory-data-based narratives encoded in a symbolic format that informally we refer to as English. But a library is still a library. It’s a place where serious people go to have the freedom to think without anybody poking and prodding them, in the company of other serious people who sit silently around us and yet encourage us in our own pursuits and projects.

The future of our country is not in the hands of bullies, it’s with the kids in the library who are doing the work. I am going to bet on that from now on.”