Libraries are greatly underestimated place. Such amount of knowledge for free, accessible to everyone, are important ways to learn and read in a world which is overconnected. Quiet places like libraries are also great ways to reconnect to silence, in place where screens are more and more important, and then favor superficiality, and then mediocrity.
Libraries have been places for revolutionaries to express their thoughts. Marx spent a lot of time in the British Museum library in London. The same way Lenin made libraries in the heart of his life. Of course libraries are often linked to studying. In Judaism studying is a divine major duty : spending a great deal of time studying the Torah and the Talmud are necessary way to learn. To this extend libraries can respond to this need. Other figures, with different ideas, succeeded to completely change their lives thanks to libraries : for instance Malcolm X, the great black leader in the 60’s in the United States, went of drug traffics and delinquency thanks to a black leader in prison who motivated him to read a lot of books in libraries.
Great revolutionaries had often a great deal of knowledge and culture. Physical violence is often less efficient than reading and educating a lot. For instance Lenin (I don’t share at all his ideas) was a lot of dangerous reading a great deal of books in libraries than talking in meetings or demonstrating violently. With less violent ideas it looks important to promote more libraries in city lives. Encouraging people to cultivate and educate themselves is a very efficient way to tackle poverty, violence, delinquency and many kinds of oppression. For instance Luther, in the XVIth century, was the first in history to educate and alphabetize massively women : he participated a great deal to the renewal of the Western world. Moreover it is an efficient way to promote economic growth. In our time of decadence, where many people are unsatisfied of the dominant mediocrity of our society, libraries can be great way to react and resist to this tendency ; it can also promote alternative ways to approach social relations.
Promoting libraries should be a real political engagement. To this extend it is necessary to encourage this kind of knowledge. Moreover it is hardly possible to realize the luck we have today to have access to these treasures of knowledge for free (except if you return borrowed books to late). This luck has to be promoted widely and financing more libraries, more activities and investing in more infrastructures can have a middle-long run real positive impact.
The observer 