I was glad to open the New York Times last Monday and see the headline:
“In Steinbeck’s Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open.” After
visiting Salinas, Calif., over the weekend, I was eager to find out whether
the disturbing and uplifting events there would gain any significant
national coverage.
It was a close call. Other than the medium-length Times article,
accompanied by a photo of an 8-year-old girl standing next to an endangered
library, the media coverage was sparse. And the Times piece -- while doing a
good job of focusing on the danger that all three public libraries in
Salinas might close by midyear -- bypassed the connections that many
participants in a 24-hour “read-in” had made between lavish spending on war
overseas and a funding crisis for libraries at home.
Through the night’s darkness, on an outer wall of the Cesar Chavez
Library, a projection showed the mounting revenues from Salinas taxpayers
that have helped to pay for the war in Iraq -- already more than $80
million. The odometer image kept spinning while authors read into the night
as part of the protest against the planned closure of the public libraries
in a city that John Steinbeck once called home.
Looking at the dozens of tents pitched across the library’s lawn, I
thought of an encampment that I saw 37 years ago on the mall of the nation’s
capital. Shortly after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the remnants of
the Poor People’s Campaign had come to Washington in order to demand
economic justice at a time of war. “A nation that continues year after year
to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual death,” Dr. King had said.
Today, blocks from the public library named after the visionary
farm-worker leader Cesar Chavez, the dire need for social uplift is
apparent. Children play on concrete between rows of very shabby trailers. On
the streets, grim signs of extreme poverty are everywhere. In largely Latino
neighborhoods bereft of resources, the threatened closure of the public
libraries looms as a kind of ultimate rebuff to residents’ humanity and
aspirations.
While Americans debate the wisdom of the Iraq war, we rarely confront
the domestic costs. What could have been done with the more than $150
billion already spent on the war? And what are the implications of the fact
that huge expenditures for the war are continuing with no end in sight?
As usual, the low-income communities suffer most. Their young men and
women are more likely to come home wounded, or not come home at all. But for
most people the heaviest impacts of the far-away war are economic. Public
libraries are falling victim to the same budget priorities that opt for
military largesse while cutting back on a range of basic social programs for
health care and education.
“One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty
of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and
technological abundance,” King wrote in 1967. Those words appeared in his
book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
Retrospective media coverage has whitewashed King while ignoring how
his messages are radical challenges to the status quo of today. For
instance: “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is
socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of
civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to
take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them.
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and
immediate abolition of poverty.”
What’s happening in Salinas is an extreme version of trends in
communities across the country. Americans are finding library doors locked
more often, and librarians anticipate that the worst is yet to come. We can
only imagine what Dr. King would have said about a country where children
can no longer be assured that public libraries will stay open.
The young people who helped to organize the 24-hour read-in at the
Cesar Chavez Library were born long after the Poor People’s Campaign
collapsed in the wake of the King assassination in early April 1968. Yet
they face enduring consequences of that campaign’s failure.
History is a prologue written in stone, but the present offers new
possibilities. The next generations deserve a future. And we all need media
coverage that provides news with depth and context in human terms.
_________________________________________
Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death,” will be published in early summer. His columns
and other writings can be found at
www.normansolomon.com. To find out more
about the ongoing campaign to save the public libraries in Salinas, visit:
http://www.codepink4peace.org/National_Actions_Salinas.shtml
