I guess you could file this one under "technology isn't everything."
Some lowlife torched the four-year-old Williamsport Library in northwestern Indiana. I don't know how many books a library in a 2,000-population town would hold -- probably not many by Fort Wayne standards. Almost any of our branches would likely have more.
The complete works of Shakespeare can be stored in about five megabytes of space. I carry around a 1GB flash drive smaller than a stick of gum; that could hold a pickup truck full of books. I also have 40 GB and 60 GB portable hard drives, each small enough to slip into my front pocket. I could get a 100 GB drive, of the same size, for less than $200, and it would hold a library floor full of academic journals. If I had that material on my hard drive, and the drive were lost or stolen, I would be annoyed but not devastated. Get another hard drive, fill it up again.
Yet the mindless destruction of this small library saddened me and angered me as much as any heinous crime I've read about lately. It's the perfect representation of all crime, the need of some people not happy with their own circumstances to steal or destroy the efforts of others. A library is not just an accumulation of knowledge. It is the symbol of humankind's yearning for knowledge, the repository of what we have learned and how we have argued with each other in the learning. A library represents the very best we have to offer each other -- what we can understand from the pain of the past, the turmoil of the present and the uncertainty of the future, all collected in one place so that we might advance, one small step at a time, in our shared journey.
