The gospel of intolerance wins

Book-banners achieve their goal in Lake Luzerne

The Rockwell Falls Public Library in Lake Luzerne has closed, the predictable result of a campaign by people who don’t work at the library to censor its programs and control which books get put on its shelves.

When I worked for the Post-Star, we used to have people calling to tell us which stories we should be running, which page they should be on and what their headlines should be. Certain ones called so often I got to know them a little. They were of a type — older folks who paid attention to politics and, therefore, believed they knew how to put together newspapers better than those who had been doing it for 25 or 30 years.

The disruption at Rockwell Falls library is different in that the people complaining support the library through taxes. But it’s the same in that the complainants believe they know better how to do the job than a librarian who has made it her calling.

Their complaints concern a drag show they would never attend and books they don’t want to read. When they go out to eat, do they demand that dishes they don’t like be removed from the menu?

This is the crux of the campaign of censorship now sweeping the country — to control what other people do. 

It’s dizzying how fast things have turned around. Not long ago, many conservatives (and others) were complaining about a liberal tendency to censor free speech, particularly on college campuses, and to stretch a sensitivity about vocabulary to the extreme of blacklisting books and the professors who assigned them.

Many liberals like me thought this sensitivity went too far. But conservatives have now taken their sensitivities much further by embedding them in legislation. Teachers in Florida are now forbidden by law from honoring a trans student’s request to call them by their preferred pronoun.

Conservatives in Lake Luzerne have taken their sensitivities to the extreme of driving out two of their library’s three employees, including the director, forcing the library’s closure.

Is it better to have no books at all than the possibility of someone reading something they find offensive, challenging or upsetting?

The wonderful thing is the fascination the book-banners have with the objects of their disgust. They talk incessantly about the books they hate, even insisting on reading them aloud at public meetings.

It’s so awful, these graphic details — we must make sure everyone hears them!

If books about gay and trans relationships were allowed to just sit quietly on the shelves, then only those people — young and old — who wanted or needed to read them would seek them out.

Most likely, the library will reopen someday. I hope the new director has the courage of the old one — Courtney Keir — who refused to buckle to the forces of intolerance. I hope no one agrees to take the job without a guarantee they’ll have the authority to do it.

Cole’s Woods

Cole’s Woods has a great variety of flora and fauna for its relatively small extent. Bella and I were walking there recently and saw three deer bound up a hill, then cross in front of us, one by one, and vanish with a leap and a rustle into the woods on the other side. I wasn’t quick enough to get photos. But I have managed to get a few shots of more slow-moving life forms along the trails in recent days.

This beautiful butterfly (or moth) wasn’t moving, but it may have had a little bit of life left to live.

I had never seen yellow and slightly fuzzy fungi like this before.

This woolly bear was very much alive and making its slow way across the trail. Woolly bears aren’t actually bears, although the resemblance is striking. They’re caterpillars of the Isabella tiger moth, seen below.

Isabella Tiger Moth. Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren/Wikimedia Commons.