January 20, 2006 - the First Amendment is about personal liberty

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to wrap up a book I've been writing.

Most of it was done, but I wanted to do some in-depth research on a topic near and dear to me: the First Amendment. I've learned a lot.

There are two ideas about the United States Constitution. One of them is that the Founders were unanimously wise, prescient, and intended to give us precisely the rights we take for granted today.

That's wrong. They were plenty smart, all right. If I could travel back in time, these are definitely the folks I'd want to hang out with.

But seers they were not. They never imagined talk radio, the Internet, or the bazooka. It never occurred to them that labor unions might picket public schools, or loudspeakers blast away outside hospitals.

Another idea was that the Founders were early born-again Christians, determined, in the words of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, "to perpetuate a Christian order."

Wrong again.

"...the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." (Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship between The United States and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary, 1796-1797.)

In addition to the plain language of the Constitution (the first national Constitution in the western world that used neither the words "God" nor "Jesus Christ"), there was a provision that no religious test should be required for the holding of any public office.

During the ratification of the Constitution, a Christian preamble was proposed -- and firmly rejected.

I've learned three key lessons through my studies about the First Amendment.

1. The Constitution in general, and the First Amendment in particular, was not intended to describe a fully-imagined state. It mostly detailed some of the key things the United States should NOT do -- based on the most egregious of England's laws.

2. The "wall of separation" was real. The intent was more than just to prevent the state from interfering with religion. It was also to prevent religion from interfering with the state. Or as James Madison said, "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

3. The real story of the Constitution, and of the First Amendment, is one of evolution toward individual liberty.

Originally, the Constitution withheld the vote from women, from slaves, and from people who did not own property.

Over the centuries, our government has tried to extend the right of equal protection under the law to everyone. Or at least, that is the clearest modern intent of the Supreme Court.

The central idea of our government -- that it exists to serve the people, not the other way around -- is almost as radical today as it was when it was formed.

I've learned something else: the greatest challenges to our freedoms come during a time of war.

There was the Alien and Sedition Act, enacted in 1798 (amid the threat of war with France). There were many limitations on free speech before and during the Civil War.

In 1914, at the height of the patriotic fervor of the First World War, a Pennsylvania town enacted a law requiring every student in its schools to salute the flag in the manner of a Fascist salute (right arm raised stiffly, palm forward) while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

In World War II, even weather reports were suppressed.

But none of this was new, not really. There have always been people eager to seize the power of government, either to compel acts of obedience, or to mandate silence.

The essential idea of the First Amendment, however, was utterly new: the JOB of the state was to assure the freedom of individuals to say, or not say, pretty darn close to anything they pleased.

And so it is.

January 13, 2006 - Mark Weston

Thirty years ago, I began writing a library column for the “Southglenn News,” the official monthly publication of the Southglenn Civic Association. At the time, I was a wet behind the ears library assistant at the Christensen Library in the Arapahoe Regional Library District. I went on to obtain a graduate degree in librarianship from the University of Denver, worked in a variety of libraries and related private business for another ten years or so, then left that field for another career. I will never forget (nor will those who were there) the experience of piloting our 40-foot long Gerstenslager Bookmobile from westbound I-225 across all lanes of southbound I-25, careening off onto the Belleview exit in the nick of time.

Life is full of turning wheels, and here I am again with a library column byline, written this time from the perspective of the President of the Douglas County Libraries Board of Trustees. The regular inhabitant of this space, Jamie LaRue, is taking a couple of weeks leave, but regular readers need not despair; he’ll be back quite soon.

Douglas County Libraries is excited finally to be able to announce the Grand Opening of the new Neighborhood Library at Roxborough. Located next to Safeway in the Roxborough Marketplace, this facility is, among other things, final proof that we keep our campaign promises. Ten years ago, the last time we asked Douglas County voters to increase property taxes for libraries, we promised to expand the quantity and quality of our services, as well as to build new facilities. Not only have we accomplished what we promised (Parker, Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree and Roxborough), the county seat got a new P.S. Miller Library as a result of some good luck and fast response.

We keep our campaign promises, and we are good stewards of your money. We operate on an annual budget (2006) of about $17.7 million. Most of this comes from property taxes, and most of it is spent to compensate well over 325 full- and part-time employees. Also, this year we’ll spend just under $3 million to purchase software licenses, periodicals, recorded materials (audio and audio-visual) and, oh yes, books.

Some of our libraries are bulging at their seams, notably Parker and Lone Tree. We are working closely with the Town of Parker and the Douglas County School District to examine the efficacy of constructing a shared facility. Similar discussions with partners in Lone Tree, including the City government, its developer, and the Arapahoe Community College are underway. There will come a time when some of the busiest libraries in the County’s fastest-growing communities will need to be replaced with bigger facilities.

Meanwhile, we continually examine what we do, with an eye toward improving service, increasing efficiency, and responding to your wants and needs. Library users (did you know that 72.3% of all Douglas County households have at least one library cardholder?) will notice some big changes this year, as we replace 20th Century barcodes with 21st Century radio frequency identification (RFID). This will enable our superb staff to spend less time on tasks better suited to machines and, consequently, more time helping library customers discover.

These actions, along with implementation of new service models at the busiest libraries, will allow us for now to continue to give you the best service within our existing mill levy constraints.

Finally, while everyone’s memory of the holidays is still fresh, let me remind you that the next big event is Ground Hog Day, February 2. It holds little meaning here, as winter does not really begin until March, irrespective of cloudy weather or rodent shadow. Nonetheless, it comes just days after the Roxborough Grand Opening and less than two weeks before St. Valentine’s Day. The wheel turns.

Mark Weston
President
Douglas County Libraries Board of Trustees

January 6, 2006 - Favorite 2005 reads

By Rochelle Logan, Associate Director of Support Services

Libraries are not just about books. We consider the public library a meeting place, a center of the community, somewhere you can check out music, DVDs, audio books and work on a computer. With that said, it is still true that when you say the word “library” to most people, they think of books. It is also true that many librarians love to read and talk about books and I'm no exception. Through the holidays, I attended parties and my ears perked up whenever I heard friends talking about their latest favorite books. I'm here to give you my list of favorites. They were not all new in 2005 and they were not bestsellers. My favorites are, of course, available at your local library.

/Lost in the Forest/ by Sue Miller
Sue Miller is best known for her novel /The Good Mother/ published to critical acclaim and made into a motion picture. Miller often writes about family dynamics, especially broken families. /Lost in the Forest/ takes place in the wine country of Napa Valley. The story centers on a divorced woman and her children after her new husband dies in a traffic accident. The middle child, Daisy has a hard time dealing with the loss. Her journey is especially poignant. Miller presents a cast of characters who are full of life and a story that kept me pondering even when I put the book down.

/This is Not Civilization/ by Robert Rosenberg
A seemingly unconnected cast of characters and places come together in this story by first novelist Rosenberg. Jeff Hartig, an American Peace Corp volunteer travels to Kyrgyzstan after what he considers a failed mission at an Apache reservation. His relationships with an Apache teenager, the people of a small Kyrgyzstan village and eventually a circle of friends in Istanbul may sound unlikely. However, Rosenberg's style makes it work. I'm going to recommend this one to my reading group. It would be a good discussion book.

/The Birth of Venus/ by Sarah Dunant
Set in the 1400’s in Florence, Italy, British author, Dunant writes a full-bodied novel about a young girl’s infatuation with the disturbed artist her parents hire to paint the walls of the family chapel. Her life is complicated by an arranged marriage and the political upheaval of the times. This excellent period piece transports the reader to a luxurious, passionate, and violent time.

/Baker Towers/ by Jennifer Haigh
In her sophomore offering after the award-winning /Mrs. Kimble/, Jennifer Haigh writes a story about a family's struggles in a Pennsylvania coal town after World War II. The hardship of the women's lives and their relationships with each other as well as the colorful members of the community makes for an enjoyable read. A /Library Journal/ reviewer said, "Haigh uses evocative prose to create a picture of a company town—and of the human condition—that is both accurate and moving."

/Broken for You/ by Stephanie Kallos
This debut novel by Seattle teacher, Kallos has some unexpected twists in a well-crafted plot. Her main character, Margaret lives alone in a mansion, rarely going out after the death of her young son. She talks to the priceless antiques in the house as one might talk to a pet. After a cancer scare, she decides to open her home to a renter, then two renters, then three. This is a compelling story of how an invented family comes together, finding unconventional ways to help each other heal.

/The Known World/ by Edward P. Jones
In pre-Civil War Virginia, former slave, Henry Townsend makes enough money to buy land and (paradoxically) slaves. I listened to this on CD while driving in my car. It kept me going on long stretches of road. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004 for /The Known World./

The rest of my 2005 favorites:

/The Lake, the River and the Other Lake/ by Steve Amick
/The Inner Circle/ by T. C. Boyle
/The Confessions of Max Tivoli/ by Andrew Sean Greer
/Blackbird House/ by Alice Hoffman
/Twilight/ by Katherine Mosby
/Shadow of the Wind/ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

December 29, 2005 - sleep, perchance to dream

The last couple weeks of the year are precious to me.

The library's budget has been adopted for the next year. The meetings tend to be put off till January, because lots of people have taken time off.

The frenzy of shopping is done. The parties are over. Now comes one of the true gifts of the year: time to think.

So much of our lives is conducted as if we were in some kind of speed trial. Or as I read in "The World is Flat," by Thomas Friedman,

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, better start running.

Friedman was writing about globalization. The above is an African proverb, translated into Mandarin, and posted by an American entrepreneur on the front door of a factory he opened in China, which is itself a little bewildering.

And a little sad. On the one hand, it is better to make widgets than to make war.

On the other, it is possible to be so caught up in the outer world that the inner is neglected. After all, even lions spend an average of 13.5 hours a day sleeping. (Just so you know, the extremes are brown bats at almost 20 hours of sleep per day, and giraffes at a paltry 1.9. In yet more information suggesting kinship among us apes, baboons sleep 10.3, chimpanzees 9.7. While human infants sleep a whopping 16 hours a day, adults grab just 8. )

The National Center on Sleep Disorders says it is a myth that people need less sleep as they get older (aside from infants, that is). They just GET less sleep.

Here's another myth: "sleep is time for the body in general and the brain specifically to shut down for rest." It turns out that the brain is even busier when it's asleep. Sleep is a dynamic process.

It is also necessary. Rats deprived of sleep will die in 2 to 3 weeks -- just about as long as it takes to die of starvation.

But my point is not that we need more sleep, although most of us do.

My point is that downtime isn't necessarily unproductive. We need cycles in our lives, a variance of rhythm. Our alertness, our health, our success, depends upon troughs of busy-ness, time to allow for the active exploration of things we haven't yet had time to consider.

So, if you can, stop running. Seize the slow times. Stroll through the library, trolling for the odd item that will dredge up an issue you were unconsciously hoping to explore.

Or sit by one of our fireplaces and dream. We need dreams -- and we need time to dream them.

December 22, 2004 - A Gift Suitable for All Ages

For the past several years, I've been reprinting what I've come to think of as "my Christmas column" -- a tradition. I hope you enjoy it.

***

What we really need is an all-purpose gift that will satisfy everybody. It should be suitable for all ages. It should require no assembly. It shouldn't need batteries. You shouldn't have to feed it. It should last forever. It should be constantly entertaining. The more the recipient uses it, the more he or she should like it.

And of course, it should be free.

No such animal, right? Wrong. I'm talking about a library card.

I'll never understand it. Most adults these days carry cards of every description; most of them DON'T have library cards. So for the woman or man who has everything, why not offer everything else? -- access to the total accumulated knowledge of the human race, not to mention the most wonderful stories ever told.

Of course, the real winner of a gift like this is not an adult. It's a child.

Here's all you have to do to make your holidays a success. First, come down to the library and fill out a library card application for your child. Then, check out three of four books. Wrap the card and the books and set them under the tree. Save this very special package for last.

When the child rips it open, say that this unassuming little card will let him or her get presents all year long. Then read your child to sleep that night with one of the books.

After your children have gotten bored with all their expensive toys, read them (or have them read) the other books, then trot them down to the library in that slow week after the main event. Teach your children about exchanging one present for another.

At the library, every day is Christmas. Behind every book cover there are riches. After introducing your kids to a treasure trove beyond Aladdin's wildest dreams, why not mosey over to the adult section, and browse through the latest offerings yourself? You know you deserve it.

Many people -- librarians, teachers, Secretaries of Education, even sport celebrities and actors -- have urged every child to obtain and use a library card. It's good advice.

Besides, at prices like these, who can argue? If you are not fully satisfied after a lifetime of learning and pleasure -- I'll cheerfully refund your money.

Trust me, this could be the best Christmas card you'll ever send.

---

Note: All Douglas County libraries will be closed from 3 p.m., Saturday, December 24, to 9 a.m., Monday, December 26.

December 15, 2005 - cultivate an inner life

There are many things parents would agree they want for their children. Health. Love. Family and friends. Success, defined as "a respectable job that pays well enough to provide all of the essentials, and some of the luxuries, of life."

But you know what I most want for each of my kids? I want them to have a rich inner life.

You can lose your health, your lover, even your family and friends. You can lose your job and your home. In disasters, you can lose your ability to put food on the table.

But all of that is your OUTER life. If you have a rich inner life, you can get by. (At least, long enough to start rebuilding.)

I've been reading a luminous little library book lately called "Seeds from a Birch Tree," by Clark Strand. It's supposed topic is writing haiku (high-KOO)-- a Japanese verse form with rules so simple a child could follow them.

Haiku has 17 syllables: 5 on the first line, 7 on the second, and 5 on the third. The poem includes a seasonal reference. That's just about it.

And in fact children DO write haiku, often very good ones.

But what the book is really about is cultivating a consciousness, a plain and simple awareness that, first, marks something in the world. A raindrop. A tree branch. A window blind.

Second, the act of seeing, and capturing an image in haiku, also takes you out of yourself. Or maybe a better way to say this is that it completely removes the barrier between your deepest self and that moment of perception.

There are lots of things I'm grateful for in my life. But one of my favorites is a poem I wrote over 30 years ago.

I was hitchhiking through Safford, Arizona. I walked far from the road to get closer to a spectacular meadow, a sea of orange and yellow flowers.

When I got to the edge, I dropped to my knees to examine the petals.

And then I heard, low and pervasive, miles of ... buzzing.

Here's the poem (and I just want to point out that I shaved a few syllables off every single line, making it a kind of haiku espresso):

desert poppies:
I kneel to a field
of bees

That moment is ineradicable in my life. It is grounded in a single instant. Yet it is also timeless.

But my point isn't poetry. It's about storing up treasures that endure.

Children who grow up reading, or being read to, develop a set of internal experiences, based on symbols and dreams and language. Those stories and characters and situations work deeper and deeper into their consciousness.

Over time, this deepening understanding of life, coupled with fresh insights and new, unexpected encounters with the real world, makes up an always richer field of possibility, of insight, of connection, of beauty, of joy.

It's just one of the reasons that I no longer turn on a radio when I'm alone. It's why I don't watch TV shows anymore, at all.

It's why I can be utterly content, even very, very busy, even when I'm just walking around the block.

It's because reading, watching, listening, thinking, has now set up such a never-ending flood of images, and ideas, and webs of relationships among all that, that I now have an inner life, impervious or at least resistant to the pressures of the mob. Every child should have one.

On the outside, it's like a field of desert poppies. On the inside, like bees.

December 8, 2005 - torture: from the dark ages to today

Sometimes you stumble across a book you didn't know you were looking for. For me, it was finding the library's copy of "The History of Torture and Execution," by Jean Kellaway.

Every time I come across the story of somebody stretched on the rack -- or wedged into the Spanish boot, or broken by thumbscrews, or victimized by any of a variety of infernal devices -- I feel an immediate sense both of horror and of recognition.

Maybe it's because so many of the people I read about as a child were scientists, and were often subjected to punishment for "heresy" -- the crime of not agreeing with powerful people.

It didn't make any difference, of course, that the scientists were doing no more than recording actual observations and making obvious inferences about the real world. It didn't make any difference that what they were saying was true.

What mattered was that somebody in a position of authority was given the right to force confessions, coerce the "recanting" of some belief, or brutally extract the names of others to be tortured.

Inevitably, such permission turned into the gruesome and ghastly abuse of power. History is littered with the maddened, mangled, or murdered remains of innocent people.

The irony is that things secured through torture are unreliable. People will say anything to get the pain to stop. They confess to things they never did. They promise to change their minds or hearts, but (assuming they manage to get away) don't.

And they carry a lifelong hatred of the people who bound and injured them.

So if torture is not a reliable instrument of securing either information or long term behavioral change, why does it persist?

Because it's not about any of those things. It's about power. It's about control. It's about corruption.

I have read stories about torture in modern day dictatorships, or oppressive regimes. But like most people, I associate torture with the ignorance and depravity of the Dark Ages.

So I was deeply alarmed, back in 2002, when the CIA floated a "trial balloon," carried by many national newspapers, to find out how the nation felt about torture, post 9/11. The reassuringly swift flurry of public astonishment led to a lot of government back-pedaling.

Except, we now find, there was an August 2002 memo from the Justice Department suggesting that President Bush had the authority to override international torture laws.

More recently, Senator John McCain introduced a bill to Congress explicitly banning torture. It carried by a vote of 90-9. McCain is both a former prisoner of war, and a torture victim.

Incredibly, according to the Denver Post, "Vice President Dick Cheney has tried to persuade Congress to exempt the CIA from the proposed ban, and Bush has threatened a veto if the ban is included in the bill."

I was shocked that the Vice-President of the United States wants the option to use torture, and would say so right out in public. President Bush, who said, "the U.S. does not torture," nonetheless wants the right to.

It makes you wonder. Are they seeking permission -- or forgiveness?

Of course, nine Army reservists were convicted of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Other "suspects" have died during "questioning" by American soldiers, as has been widely reported. There are now rumors of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, run by the CIA.

Let me put that another way: the U.S. does torture. We still don't know the full extent.

There are apologists for our Empire, who first recite the atrocities of criminals, then suggest that torture is too good for them.

But this is the fact that is always obscured: there is no way to ensure that torture will be used only against the guilty.

Shall we now we resurrect the foot press, the tongue tearer, the Spanish Spider, the revolving drum, and the Iron Maiden?

And on whom shall we use them next?