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Re: Questions that didn't used to be sinister



Sinister is a relative term. No questions are sinister. There is no witchcraft involved in learning. Witches in the not so recent past were very clever herbalist or lonely old people or intellectuals living on the fringes of society. People saw them as a threat to their known way of life. The power of knowledge they had was their ultimate downfall. Let us not go back there.
 
Freedom of information is one of the most sought after liberties one can aim for and this is the only country that gives us the constitutional right.
Liberty is easily curtailed, but very difficult to win. Give it a real deep thought before doing so. War time measures have an insidious way of remaining in place indefinitely.
 
Today a student was looking for information related to nuclear waste, airforce bases, pollution and how to locate information relating to similar events and the thought crossed my mind that an innocent class project can be taken to be 'sinister' if you read too much into it.
 
Let us not be dragged back to the Dark Ages. Let us not kowtow to dumb terrorists and give up our ideals so easily. Let us bring the uninformed upto our level of sophistication and not be dragged into the deep, dark, ditch of ignorance with the ignorant and uninitiated.
 
American libraries are the real bastions of freedom and we are the keepers of this most treasured of freedoms. Let us keep it so, till we can. Let us be enlightened and free and not confused and ignorant as Matthew Arnold put it beautifully:
 
And we are here as on a darkling plain  
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,  
 Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

 
 
Nighat Saleemi
Reference Librarian and Archivist
The Hotchkiss School
POBox 800
Lakeville, CT 06039
Tel: 860-435-3258