Mark Twain Branch Detroit Public Library
This photo above speaks to me for several reasons. The most obvious is the lifetime of care put by authors into their works that were published and stored in libraries and bookshelves in our homes. I think of the librarians who love books and love to share them with the public. This library most surely was closed due to local budget cuts - the government deemed that libraries were not a top priority as their community collapsed along with the US automobile industry.
But why were the books just tossed aside - literally wasted? Why were they not stored or given to other communities who would have cherished the gift? I can only conclude that this photo is one more very sad piece of evidence of the corporate oligarchies 'dumbing down' of the American people.
The public, especially working class and poor people, are superfluous - no longer needed as corporate investment and jobs moved overseas. Trump said he was going to fix all this but so far the only thing he has done is request $54 billion more for the Pentagon budget in Fiscal Year 2018.
I've long written about the Pentagon's vision for America in the coming years under corporate globalization of the world economy - they call it 'security export'. We won't make cars, TV's, cell phones, clothes, shoes and other products here anymore.
Obviously there was one other key reason for the shuttering of this library and many others like it across the nation. It is the Internet. Many people are not reading books and have become used to reading short bits of things online. It's a hurry up, drive-up window world.... people want their fast food, fast news, and their social change right now.
So an additional strategy of Mr. Big, and his ringside click of corporate collaborators, is to reduce our access to the Internet. Imagine the world today without a fully open world-wide web. Take that away and many of us will be flying blind.
The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online. If they get their way, they’ll allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees. Former Verizon lawyer-turned-FCC Chair Ajit Pai's is implementing just such a plan to kill net neutrality in its tracks.
Without net neutrality, the Internet will become more like Cable TV, where the content you see is what your provider puts in front of you at a steep price.
Without net neutrality, the Internet will become more like Cable TV, where the content you see is what your provider puts in front of you at a steep price.
On July 12 an Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality is being organized. Major sites like Amazon, Netflix, Vimeo, Reddit, and Twitter are partnering with the Day of Action, it is anticipated that this will be one of the largest online protests in history.
If you want to support independence of free information, free thinking, a fair society that depends on the sharing of ideas then please help spread the word to your friends and family right now.
You can learn more about the day of action here
Bruce
2 comments:
O, brave new world, that has such creatures in it!
I got that quote from a book which most libraries were forced to remove from circulation if not surrendering the books themselves. There's a second book in the series Brave New World, Revisited, which put forth the science, now 6 decades since it's publishing, the first book as science and political described. A throw-away economy, coerced thought and speech conformity, dressed up as progress, leisure, fun, freedom.
Where people used the slogans they heard constantly, repeated by their own speech, confessing something they said so often they believed it. It has a name, the technique.
Many names, in fact. Conditioned Reflexes, Pavlovian Conditioning, Brainwashing. It had been an art form until the last 150 years. When it was established as a method of training a dog or a human to believe. What to believe? Anything They tell us to believe. Hearing the sad untruths only comes to a bigger and badder part. It's not listening to the affirmations that changes our perception so drastically. It's when WE join the chorus. When the Savage begins to speak the lies to himself or any other, maybe go along to get along, knowing it's a lie but pretending to believe, makes you or me or him actually believe.
Sad, eh? They were burning the first Brave New World as soon as it was published, and the people would be told that it was denied to them because it's "porn". People still chant that reasoning. People who never read the book because they were told that it was porn.
Aldous Huxley died about the time I was born, Eisenhower was still president.
I spent an hour in the cool downstairs of a public library in central Maine yesterday. Not a single person came into the children's section while I was there. Upstairs, people were only looking at computers, not books. I was the only mom I knew 20 years ago who wouldn't let my children have a gaming system in our home. Screen culture has now made practically everyone a potential drone operator, and effectively hastened the death of books.
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