A Suggestion From a Librarian

xdaringdamselx:

BOOKS. BUY LOTS OF BOOKS.

This is a good suggestion in the best of times, but I’d particularly like to extend the suggestion now.

Buy books detailing everything important in our pasts: black history and culture, Muslim history and culture, Latinx history and culture, LGBTQ+ history and culture, Jewish history and culture, feminist history, labor and organizing and activism history, science texts, everything. I would suggest hard copies, and if possible, multiple copies to share. Don’t let anybody erase or alter the past. Never let a moment of it be forgotten or revised or washed away. Hold onto it, and hoard it like treasure.

And grow your wealth in this form, too–write your own histories, document and detail things if you can. Don’t let them change the present, and don’t let them normalize any of this shit. Write things down, remember them, and keep shouting to the heavens–we won’t be forgotten and kept down.

And buy lots of fiction from those same groups as well! Fantasy breeds hope, and we’re gonna need a lot of hope in our hearts, and a place to escape to when things get rough.

I am just… DEEPLY CONCERNED about the kind of people soon to be in charge, the people who want so desperately and direly to crush all of us underneath their heels and stamp us out, and have made no secret of it. All too often, that kind of shit starts with a controlling of the story and the press, and sometimes even worse. And that walking hairclog has made no secret of how he wants the story to be told.

So extend your library. Just in case. Stay knowledgeable and clever and wise.