Elisabeth’s Reviews > Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library > Status Update

I can imagine a chair for people engage through lenses of curiosity and empathy, not revenge or anger or dominance. Not with a priority, above all else, to be “right“.

Library work offers a critical person: one who can help separate what has happened from how an individual feels about it. With a neutral stance, they can provide information to help the patron decide how they actually feel, not just what an algorithm or podcast or article or institution or individual wants to sway them to feel.

If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that’s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

And when I looked even further back down the road, I was exiting to the optimistic, determined woman in Buffalo, who became a librarian. I recognize only that I wish I could’ve done and cared more for her. Moving to California felt in some ways like a way to reclaim some selfish life for her.

I would define empathy fatigue as the physically and emotionally, painful and complicated consequence of repeated exposure to stressful traumatic events. It most often results from working directly with victims of disasters, trauma illness. Social workers, healthcare workers, firefighters, journalists, teachers, and librarians, are all particularly susceptible to experiencing it.

But the letter also serves as a reminder to me that the lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more your moral character is dependent on your work ethic and how productive you can be.

This is the gift of an honest reckoning with their past: freedom to move forward, with truth, in truth. However, painful it may be, in the collective or individual process, we eventually come to better and more completely understand the world around us and how we might do better.

Famed astronomer an astrophysicist Carl Sagan hits a little closer to a more complete truth about libraries: “the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of her culture, and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.“