Chapter Eight
Here comes Karl Marx!” Declan Turner shouts at me as I approach the library. He and a crowd of a dozen people are protesting outside. They’re standing at a distance from the front double doors. He’s holding his phone in my face. The people with him are carrying signs that say:
PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!
DEFEND TRADITIONAL VALUES!
KEEP THE PERVERTS OUT OF THE LIbrARY!
“Karl Marx?” I repeat. “Really?”
I push through the crowd like a disgraced celebrity fighting off a pack of aggressive paparazzi. I’m worried someone is going to hit me. They’re all shouting. Taking my picture.
“I looked you up!” Declan says with his phone still in my face. “You thought you could hide it!”
Hide what?
“You’re part of the gay agenda!” he says.
I look at him, baffled. “What does that have to do with anything? Are you suggesting I’m hiding that I’m gay?”
I’m wearing Birkenstocks and men’s pants with a carabiner on my belt loop. I have a trans flag pinned to my lanyard, blue hair, and a wedding band on my finger with my wife’s name engraved on the outside.
“I am not hiding anything,” I say.
“We don’t care that you’re gay!” an angry woman shouts at me.
I make a face. “He brought it up—”
“We have no problem with homosexuals! Don’t try to make this into us being anti-homosexual! This has nothing to do with that! Keep your sexual preferences in the bedroom!” she shouts.
“What?” I scowl. “That last thing you said sort of contradicts the prior—”
“And keep drag queens away from our kids! And porn out of the library! And if you disagree, you shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children! You should be in prison! Communist!”
Some people are shouting about puberty blockers for no good reason. I hear someone say something about vaccines and drinking unpasteurized milk.
“What are you all talking about?” I shout. “Get out of my way!”
Patty has the front door open for me. She’s beckoning me inside. “Get in here, Darcy!”
“Hi, Brenda, we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands over here.”
I’m in the back room on the phone.
“I heard, yes. Mordecai called the police because they threatened him. I’m in touch with them as we speak. We’ve got two officers heading there right now. I’m sure they’re almost there. Is everyone all right?”
“I think so,” I say. “I’ll send out an email to everyone working today to warn them. I’ll tell them to use the back door to avoid the crowd out front.”
“Thank you, Darcy.”
“No problem.”
She says, “Just to give you an update regarding the work the board is doing about this, and the complaints we’re receiving, we’ve reviewed our policies with legal.
Based on our review, we aren’t recommending any changes at this point; however, the board has advised that we consult the community.
So, we’ll be hosting a public forum to review our related policies.
I’m also bringing some of your suggestions, specifically about training, to the board. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Okay, thanks for keeping me in the loop. Didn’t we review our policies with the community when they were updated last year?”
“Yes. They want us to do it again.”
I can sense in her tone that she feels the same way I do about that.
“I see. Well, please let me know when that forum will be. I’d like to come.”
“Of course, yes. I will.”
I find Mordecai in the back room.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He exhales. “Yes. I’m fine. Thank you for asking.
Did someone mention that I phoned the police?
I was in early and I decided to make an executive call.
I figured if there’s a swarm of people blocking the entrance, threatening employees, and screaming that we’re all pedophiles, that probably warrants a call to the police.
Did you come to work through the front entrance where they’re protesting, too? ”
I nod. “I did.”
“Did they scream at you as well? What did they call you?”
I nod again. “They called me Karl Marx.”
He blinks. “I’m sorry, what?”
I laugh. “Don’t ask. I heard they threatened you?”
“They did, yes. I was threatened. Were you? Or were you just referred to as a German political theorist? My insults were significantly less pretentious. They just kept calling me a pedophile. And I have to say, I’m considerably more dismayed about it now that I’m aware of the disparity in insults being tossed around.
That is truly just rude. Isn’t it? God. Well, in any case, I’m so sorry they yelled at you—even if they disrespected you more favorably.
I wonder if they realize they were screaming at someone dealing with your health issues. ”
I look at him.
He continues, “You know, I wasn’t taught much about this in my library science program.
We focused a lot on cataloging, collection development, community outreach, and that sort of thing.
Very little time was spent on how to heave your way to work through a troop of angry extremists threatening to spit on you. ”
I sit down at the reference desk. I can hear the crowd outside.
They’re chanting, “Protect the kids!” I stare ahead.
I can see the children’s section from where I’m sitting.
There’s a mural painted on the wall. We commissioned it the year I started.
It’s of a yellow brick road weaving through forests and rolling hills.
In the horizon, there’s a castle, a dragon, a unicorn, and a hot-air balloon.
In the corner of the mural, there’s a group of kids reading books under a lemon tree.
I look at the computer monitor in front of me. It isn’t turned on, so I can see my reflection in the dark screen. My hair ends at my shoulders. It used to be much longer, and blond. When I started my master’s degree, it was almost at my waist.
I touch the reference desk. Someone’s taped a little motivational note to a part of the desk that patrons can’t see. It says, YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS, YOU JUST HAVE TO KNOW WHERE TO LOOK, with a smiley face drawn on the end.
In my first class in library school, we talked about the height of desks in libraries. I remember my professor sharing an image from the movie Matilda, where the librarian looks down at Matilda from her tall, towering desk. The prof asked, “What’s wrong with this image?”
We talked about why reference and circulation desks shouldn’t be too tall.
They should be a height that allows librarians to maintain eye contact with patrons without looking down at them.
They need to be accessible for people of all heights.
A person in a wheelchair shouldn’t be blocked from view.
A child shouldn’t have to crane their neck upward as if approaching a judge on their bench.
At the time, while this made sense to me, I thought it was strange that we spent our first lesson talking so much about furniture.
In my experience, a lot of being a librarian has to do with interacting with the public, paperwork, office bureaucracy, tech support, and emails. There is another element to the job, though. I think maybe that desk lecture spoke to that.
I remember reading stories in school about police demanding patron records, and librarians refusing to release them.
There was one case, in the early 2000s, in Connecticut.
Librarians were contacted by the FBI, who demanded to know what information specific patrons were accessing.
The librarians challenged this in court, and the judge ruled in the librarians’ favor.
I remember learning that we have to defend our patrons’ privacy for legal reasons, but also because people need to be free to explore information without fear of surveillance.
When I was a kid, I never kept a diary because I knew my mom would read it.
She looked at the browsing history on our family computer.
I never googled anything I wouldn’t want her to see.
There were subjects I would have benefited from investigating, like birth control.
The first time I hooked up with a guy, we didn’t use protection.
I didn’t know enough. I also would have benefited from reading about having an emotionally abusive mother.
I would have benefited from being exposed to more content featuring lesbians too.
I didn’t read or watch anything that centered on lesbians until I was well into my twenties.
Beyond needing access to information for the sake of becoming informed, and exposing ourselves to different ideas, it’s also important that we have access to information that represents different viewpoints—even viewpoints that are widely considered bad.
Engaging with information that opposes our own opinions can open our minds up to new ideas, and it can help us get a deeper understanding of our own position.
This is part of what justifies keeping or reading information that’s hateful or ignorant.
When we understand what we don’t believe, we better understand what we do.
I remember sitting in class, talking about the moral panic that happens after horrible events, like school shootings.
Metal music and video games are often blamed for making people do terrible things.
There’s no evidence that’s true, and we shouldn’t be afraid to read books, or play games, or listen to music because it could be used to prove we’re criminals.
There’s a personal-autonomy aspect to information privacy.
We have the right to make our own choices about what art or information we consume.
The people outside are still chanting. I close my eyes.
Before public libraries existed, there were subscription libraries. You had to pay to access them. It used to be that information was only accessible to rich and powerful people.
“Protect the kids!”
Having free, uncensored access to information is a fundamental human right. Even today, in a world where information is more accessible online, there are still barriers that libraries help resolve. People use the library. It’s busy here.