Celebrate Beaufort County’s new library, but guard against attacks on books | Opinion

Let freedom ring. Or, better yet, let freedom read.

Our community celebrated a glorious event when a new public library opened on Paris Avenue in the town of Port Royal on Aug. 24. Some 300 people came out on that sunny Saturday morning to check out the new marvel. Children sat in circles on the lawn, listening to a book being read to them beneath guardian oaks.

Politicians were interviewed, and they were rightfully proud, saying that a library forms the fabric of a community, bringing people of all sorts together.

Port Royal Mayor Kevin Phillips said it is a place to learn, better yourself and get more connected to the community. He said it was appropriate that this hallowed public place be named for longtime Port Royal mayor and educator, Samuel E. Murray.

County Council member Alice Howard should be proud of pushing to spend some $700,000 to convert an unused county building into the 462-year-old town’s first public library, and the county’s sixth library branch.

State Rep. Shannon Erickson said a library gives a town a common goal. And we can thank the legislature for increasing the allocation for county library systems this year.

To me, the library represents all that and much more. It represents the essence of our freedom. Our freedoms to think and read and write are the rarest and most valuable assets of the United State of America.

Attacks on words worry me greatly, maybe because I’ve spent a lifetime exercising the First Amendment’s freedom of the press.

Or maybe it was the tough assignment that came my way on Sept. 11, 2001 to write an editorial for an extra edition of our newspaper on the afternoon terrorists plowed full commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon in our nation’s capital.

Those attacks were designed to kill not only our kin, but our spirit and our freedom. And I could not help but compare the stunning sights that morning to the peaceful scenes of freedom I’d seen on CSPAN’s “Book TV” the day before when citizens celebrated the freedom of expression at the National Book Festival in Washington. The juxtaposition showed that terrorist attacks are not the only way we can lose our freedoms.

Now, even as we celebrate the opening of a new library in our community, we also face robust new attacks on the freedoms it represents. Book banning is back in fashion.

We face a new barrage of authoritarian, top-down threats from lawmakers and locals to yank books from public library and school library shelves.

Librarians are under attack, as professionals and, in some cases as individuals. So are the local checks and balances currently in place to see that age-appropriate books are in the right place in the library and that books that might ignite what the state calls the “prurient interest” of children are not available at all at public schools.

Those local checks and balances include ways for parents and the public to voice objections to books. But it seems now that Central Planning knows what’s best for you, comrade. And parents must give way to the Nanny State. Let’s remember why the free public libraries and professional librarians are so important to us, and trust the system already in place.

Beaufort County has had libraries since the 1700s and we don’t need a Politburo to tell us how to do it. John Jakes wrote many of his multi-million-selling historical novels during his 30 years of living on Hilton Head Island, including the “North and South” trilogy. He and his wife, Rachel, said he could not have written the first chapter without our Beaufort County public libraries.

John and Rachel gave generously to help fund the island’s current library building, opened in the mid-1990s. He also rallied book lovers here and nationally to get active in Friends of the Library organizations and lobby for increased government funding of libraries. As part of that lobbying, John Jakes wrote, “Libraries not only take us into new and exciting realms, they help us grow. They answer questions; solve problems; enable us to better ourselves.”

So, yes. Let freedom read.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.