Paper Trail

“Fear an ignorant man more than a lion.” -- Kurdish Proverb

I see them three days a week and they always cheer me up.

My gym is a good walk from a house, which isn’t a real problem unless it’s raining or bitter cold and then it really sucks.

Some mornings I pick up the pace and use my trek through the neighborhood as a warm-up for my workout.

Along the way I always pass by two Little Free Library boxes.

Little Free Library is a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minn. with a mission “to be a catalyst for building community, inspiring readers, and expanding book access for all.”

The idea is to get people reading and I’ve found some good books at the various boxes in my neighborhood.

I consider them little lighthouses, only instead of sending out bright beams of light, they’re glowing with knowledge and good will. Or at least most of the time they do.

This morning I came upon the free book box at 84th Street and Narrows Avenue, which I believe is part of the LFL system. But instead of being nearly stacked within the cabinet, the books had been dumped all over the ground.

The cruelty and stupidity of this act made me so angry You don’t want to read a book, fine--God forbid you should actually learn something--but don’t ruin it for everybody else.

I was a little behind schedule this morning, but I was determined to right this wrong. I put down my gym bag and gathered up all the books and put them back in the shelves where they belonged.

It only took me a few minutes and when I was finished, I felt so much better—for a little while, at least.

Making Music for Us

Then I looked up the street and saw pages from a booking leading up to the corner.

Apparently, the same idiot who had trashed the book box (or perhaps it was a different idiot) destroyed a copy of George Crile III’s Charlie Wilsons’s War, which Mike Nichols made into a film starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I turned onto 85th Street and saw more pages of the books leading up the block and fantasized about tracking the loser responsible for this and making him eat this story one page and at a time.

Not a very enlightened point of view, I'll admit, but I was pissed.

The title for Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird comes from the belief that it’s a sin to these birds because they “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

Well, that’s how I feel about these libraries. Why destroy something that doesn’t do anything but give us books for us to enjoy?

And it’s not just random acts of vandalism we have to worry about.

The war on books is happening on a national scale with Republican hacks in over 30 states pushing to ban books in school libraries.

Some teachers in Florida are covering their classroom libraries with construction paper or otherwise eliminated students' access to make sure they comply with a new and quite depraved state law requiring all library books to be approved by a certified media specialist.

If the phrase “certified media specialist” doesn’t make you nervous, go back and read it again.

Maybe I'm a strethcing things by linking book defacement to book bannings, but any story that begins with abusing books never ends well.

After my workout I took a detour down Fifth Avenue to do some shopping.

While walking down 80th Street, I passed a home with a Little Free Library in the front yard--untouched and ready to share.

There’s still hope.