Thursday, September 24, 2015

Halt That Book !


One of the most wonderful things in our civilization, and one of the best-kept secrets of success is the proliferation of  The Little Free Library .

The movement has prospered without any infusion of taxpayers' funds or bureaucratic mismanagement so that it pretty much interests most of the United States.

But the nasty worms and vultures are coming out of their fetid somnolence to attack one of the most beautiful imperatives ever to grace the mind and influence of literate men and women. The cancer lurks among us: that coterie of evil that wakes up every morning fueled by a raging fear that "somewhere someone is happy and that they are doing unselfis nice things..."

Especially in Shreveport Louisiana and Los Angeles California.

Some years ago, a Midwesterner, with a desire to memorialize his deceased mother who inspired him as a bibliophile, built a structure on his front lawn near his mailbox about the size of a church bulletin board but with depth enough and shelter enough to contain a selection of books.  He attached and invitation on the structure that encouraged his neighbors (and anyone else who passed by) to "take a book and leave a book". He called it his "'Little Free Library" and he recounted in a brief  paragraph his mother's lifelong advocacy for free-flowing information and love of books. All books. Any books.

Now there are thousands of these front yard libraries where people exchange literacy daily throughout the continent.  READ STORY HERE !

But nothing this beautiful, wonderful... This earth-changing can blossom and thrive without some attention from Lurking Luddites.

I'm reminded of a poem by the great Vachel Lindsay:
"Someone's always breaking windows! Someone's always throwing bricks ! Leaving filth and nasty garbage...Playing dirty YAHOO tricks !!!"

When the Little Free  Library  was endorsed by book lovers in the movie colony, police visited those who had constructed and supplied free lending stations for readers, and the officers reported that "complaints" had been received about the small  book-loan operation and that municipal authorities wanted the structures torn down, removed and NOT replaced. Permits would  be costly.

For some unaccountable reason, the mind numbing dicta have surfaced only in Shreveport Louisiana and in the toens  "within" Los Angeles. There are about 80 such creations in Los Angeles county. Stay tuned. 

THAT STORY IS HERE !

This blog is just to put our audience on alert (En Garde !!!)

Present day Politcal Correctness moves to change the meaning of clear thought and purest motives.  It is lethal to individual freedom and suspicious of anyone 
possessed of an attention span longer than a mobile text message.  And the nature of these attacks is never what the attacker adopts as camouflage cover. Certainly, to some  cretins, Rembrandt's  Night Watch or Botticelli's  Venus-on-the Halfshell might be eyesores. These clods  would decry the lack of  limbs on the Venus De Milo and opine that she scandalized the neighborhood.  But they just would be in a fit of hatred of anyone   with a love of books that have no pictures to look at.


Of all the things that we have read about that plague our civilization and threaten to hasten Gotterdammerung, these 2015 book-burners  are rivaled only by the conspirators in the 9/11 Holocaust  as enablers of the End Times that we once  did not believe in.

Mercy....