Sharing Sadness May Be Helpful As Well As Healing

It’s easy and energizing—and important—to get angry when the haters come for libraries. Those feelings mobilize signing petitions, speaking at board meetings, donations, and, crucially, voting. Those votes translate into robust funding and board members who support intellectual freedom and inclusive collections and programming, and trust the expertise of their director and staff, as well as the guidance of professional organizations.

It’s not so easy to be public with our grief when, all those things notwithstanding, we lose. Grief is enervating and exhausting—hardly the kind of emotion you want to expose to opponents.

But grief also invites empathy. It’s inherently personal. It’s harder to sustain vitriol in the face of vulnerability. And while, as we’ve long been told, the personal is political, it also carries the potential to connect us to those on the other side of an entrenched divide.

I feel grief at the prospect of losing the Patmos Library in Jamestown, MI—defunded on Election Day for standing behind the LGBTQIA+ books in its collection— though I’ve never been there. I grieve for the lost giggles and shrieks of story times; for the tweens who find sanctuary there after school, plowing through escapist paperbacks; for their older siblings who craft college applications on library computers; for the new Americans who learn how to apply for citizenship there; for the laid off workers who get help to find a new job and health insurance; and for the older adults who enliven their retirement with programs from the library.

Those things are universal to virtually every public library in the country, but they are also unique to virtually every library. The place and the people are different, and shape the resulting community institution so that it is not interchangeable with the library down the road—even if residents of one community are lucky enough to have transportation to a neighboring library and can get borrowing privileges. Which, let’s face it, many will not, especially among those who rely on the library most.

Library advocates have become increasingly sophisticated about collecting the emotional outcome stories that bring to life how libraries change lives. We may, sadly, need to start applying that savvy to collecting the outcomes of what happens when libraries are lost or gutted, whether due to pervasive underfunding, as in the UK, or ideologically driven campaigns against books, displays, and programs that represent LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC experiences, as is being attempted in the U.S.

If we can document the stories of those who have lost their libraries as movingly as those presented by the American Library Association’s Libraries Transform Communities, they could become the cornerstone of advocacy to bring those institutions back to life—and protect other endangered libraries without compromising readers’ need for books that represent everyone.

If we don’t, we run the risk of normalizing a world in which people can’t depend on public library service, and increasingly stop expecting it. Much of the UK is already there, owing to years of austerity cuts by local councils. And too many colleagues in school libraries are fighting an uphill battle against a similar fate.

For better and for worse, humans are adaptable to the new normal. This can be a strength, as when polls showed rapid and widespread growth in acceptance of marriage equality after the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges. But it can also mean we’re too quick to resign ourselves to situations that shouldn’t become the norm.

Statistics are essential to prove that libraries are well-used, and that library funding significantly correlates with better use and service. But numbers alone will never make the case for what is lost when libraries close. They must be paired with the emotional impact on real people’s lives, the stories of what patrons lose when the doors (physical and virtual) close. We must also make sure we share the impact of the loss on library workers. Obviously, staff faced with death threats and accusations of grooming will need to judge for themselves how much of their grief they feel safe to share. But when they do feel safe, it is important to address the loss not only to patrons, but to those who used to help them, and can’t anymore. Acknowledging that loss is crucial to helping such workers feel seen and supported.