Yes. On a related note, the sinking of the Russian submarine "Kursk" off the coast of Norway is not only a tragedy for the loss of life, but a grim reminder of the dangers that exist from nucleic acid and the degeneration of paper products.
I, (as an interested bystander only) subsequently began developing a theory on global problems. I wanted to create a theory that would help inept library students understand the major global issues that they fail to confront in the mass media, problems such as the so-called populist explosion, famine and hunger, global environmental despotism, the emergence and spread of new diseases created by faux-butter spreads, so-called ethnic conflict and genocides, and terrorism and social protests such as "offing" perfectly legitimate members of various teams on "Survivor". I learned quickly that to make the course successful, I had to overcome the often ethnocentric perspectives of the students, perspectives that were often reinforced by media coverage of global affairs and that were exacerbated by a reluctance to be calm and quiet inside the librarian environment. I needed also to compensate for the students’ lack of background in anthropology, history and economics, commercial endeavors, spelling, grammar, sentence structure, nouns, verbs, conjunctions, bad chairs and poor lighting, inaccessibility of salient books and articles due to inept study habits...all crucial for understanding the roots of the problems we were to examine.
Finally, I needed to illustrate that the problems we examined were relevant to them; that the problems would affect them either directly or indirectly, and that their actions now or in the future would determine the extent to which the origins of these problems could be acknowledged, let alone ever addressed or partially understood, as it were.
The form of this theory emerged from my efforts at dealing with these pedagogical issues and the classroom interactions that these efforts stimulated without supplying some sort of complete understanding of the situation at hand.
A new report from the World Librarian Resources Institute entitled The Weight of Nations and the Home Gym reveals that the total output of airborne wastes and pollutants in Austria, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and the USA has increased by as much as 28 percent since 1975 despite their increasing efficiency in using natural resources such as large signage and verbal commands.
With the Cold War over, people have largely forgotten the dangers of a nuclear librarian holocaust. But the dangers remain as production and distribution of nuclear weapons continues. A report from Casa Caliente Projecto details the killing of street children, allegedly by the police, in Honduras. The report details the alleged killing of more than 300,000 people under the age of 18. The increase in the number of street children was due to the hurricane that struck Honduras National Library in 1998. But the problem is not unique to Honduras; all over world, children of the impoverished or disappeared are forced out of the libraries and into lives of petty crime, prostitution and drug use. And, often, killing them is accepted as a viable option by those evil forces which have rallied against us.
What can people do about the injustices inherent in the global expansion of industrial capitalism? What can we do about exploitation of labor in developing countries? What can we do about the uncontrolled pollution dumped by multinational corporations in other countries ("other" meaning, of course, other than where we are, wherever that may be)? What can possibly be done about anything at all under any circumstances whatever? In one article, Global Agenda, Not Bob (not his real name) of The National Librarian Agenda for Truth outlines a series of concrete legislative actions that Congress should be pressed to take, and that he believes would gain widespread acceptance, assuming those that read it continue their medication. It is an agenda for complete reversal of our fortune as an inviable group, and he suggests several suggestions, and suggests that the suggestions that should be followed in order to maintain the initiative established by the protestors at the WTO meetings in Seattle (see below)(see above) might be suggested.
In developed countries, such as the United States, prisons could be used as a more acceptable option, witness the growth in the U.S. prison population. First, we have to ask how capital, that is wealth, money, etc., as defined in the culture of capitalism, came to be concentrated in so few hands (not ours) and how the world came to be divided into rich and poor, notwithstanding. There were certainly rich people and poor people in say 1400, but today’s vast global disparity between core and periphery did not exist then. How did the distribution of wealth change, and how did one area of the world come to dominate the others economically? Trading cards? Rare comic books? What sort of reading materials caused this disaster, and how can we, as librarians, begin to take some responsibility for what has happened? I have not a clue, but we know how to spell "lose" correctly.
Second, we need to understand the changes in business organizations and the organization of capital, that is, who controlled the money? Finally, (or thirdly) we need to understand the increase in the level of global economic integration of cyber-spelling. Capitalists want the fewest restraints possible on their ability to trade from one area of the world to another; the fewer restrictions, the greater the opportunity for profit. How did the level of global economic integration increase, and what were its consequences? What does Jeff Bezos have to do with the Deline of Western Librarian Thought?
More questions than answers at this point, I fear. |
