Are you lonely? There is a place around -the corner with a thousand friends you have not met yet. Friends who can take you on adventures you never dreamed were possible, friends who can tell you more and more about less and less but also expose you to a little about everything so you never feel left out, or wonder what you missed. Friends who can introduce you to more friends, who are right nearby. Best of all, they seldom say no. They never ask to borrow money or your car.
Andrew Carnegie, after he became America’s first billionaire, decided that to die rich was a disgrace. He wanted to give away his millions in the way that would benefit the largest number. He built libraries — over 2000 of them. Many are still open and free. You can walk in and meet new friends, authors via their works. For a very small fee, you can join the local library and have the privilege of borrowing books for a few weeks for no charge.
Even a small library like Kealakekua has more books than you are likely to be able to read in a lifetime. Sure, some would not interest you, but some that you would not even think of can show you a world you would never think to ask about. Unlike movies or television, the books don’t end in a season and disappear after 13 weeks. Some are so good they have been in circulation for hundreds of years, like “Tale of Two Cities.”
Bill Gates told me — well, he sent an email — “If I want to understand something, I read a book about it.”
Sure, you can Google it and get some factoids, but that is not always adequate or even accurate. For someone to write a book about something, they have to understand it. For the book to get printed, someone else has to be convinced the book has enough value to go to the trouble to edit it and the expense to publish. It still might be imperfect.
For a non-fiction book to get into the library it has to go through a few more filters. If the local books that passed all that are still not enough, we have a state library system that can lend books from larger libraries. Almost everything fit to print.
A city library, where they keep all the stuff you don’t know, can be the social circle for intelligent people.
I got my first library card; I think I was 11. They restricted me to the children’s section, but it had lots of interesting books about ships. When I was bored on an Army post in Korea, I learned that if I asked for time to go to the library, I was hardly ever turned down.
I started with Mark Twain, and then the next book, and the next book, in alphabetical order. I could get away from the Army while still in the Army. When officers saw me reading books, they treated me with more respect.
Do you think you know a lot about Hawaii? The Hawaiiana section of the little Kealakekua library is five shelves high and 40 feet long. You would be amazed at how much you don’t know.
Our libraries also have music and movies you may not be able to find elsewhere, free.
Planning a trip: Libraries have extensive map collections and books about places you might decide to visit or not depending on what you learn, for free. Unlike social media, when you explore at the library things you follow lead to a broader world instead of down the social media rabbit hole, where you think you know more and more, but it’s about less and less and probably wrong.
Why should we care when we have all the amenities readily available on our own and hardly use them? Because many of our neighbors don’t. Many children grow up with no books or internet.
We care because we want our keiki to grow up as responsible contributors, just as we do with public education. Keeping youth ignorant went out with the failed plantation system’s need for cheap labor.
Feedback encouraged at obenskik@gmail.com. Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now a safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today.
