Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.
I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.
In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.
But we are not.
In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.
Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.
The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.
Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.
But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.
The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.
Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.