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 |