The Old Divides

Regular readers may wish to visit this link to get an idea of just why the following post is just so angry.

Some things never change and it seems that no matter how much they try to reach out and say they understand the struggles of those on less money, how much they want equal opportunities for all, how they want to raise children from poverty and ignorance - this government is happy to see the biggest divide of all take place.

Libraries, Mr. Prime Minister and the pet gibbon you call Deputy, are the only sources of free education left in this country. You don't need a uniform, the right shoes or even the latest flask with "Transformers IV: This Time It's Mechanical" plastered all over it. You don't even have to like school.
You need to have curiosity, an open mind, a willingness to be so awed by the world around you that all the books it contained couldn't satiate you. These things are free, and by these things, the most poverty-stricken child can raise itself above it's circumstances. With the FREE support of the local library.

My parents (who I adore beyond measure) took my sister and I to my local library every week: books were bought only for Christmas and birthdays; book tokens sent by busy aunts were things to be treasured and the spending of them would take days of careful deliberation. There simply was not the money to buy the sheer number of them that I wanted, so off to the library we trotted, every Saturday. By Sunday I would have read at least half of them, tottering cramp-legged out of my bedroom, drunk on words and the images they had conjured in my mind: places I could see, places no one would ever see, people, animals, plots. The minutiae of daily life could be transformed after having my mind blown wide open by the vast theories and spaces contained within plastic-covered paperbacks.

If you close them, what do you think will happen, apart from a further devaluing of the written word? Or do you really think that all our opinions should be formed by what we read in papers or see on the news? Hmm, the words 'Murdoch' and 'propaganda' spring to mind, completely unrelated I'm sure. With no access to free and unbiased literature, you have a generation growing up who's minds are closed, limited and unable to break free from their lives because they don't know there are any other ways of living. You turn them into automatons: waking, working, watching tv, sleeping to wake again and repeat the whole day, dulled into submission by endless fucking Top Gear repeats and National Lottery game shows.

But submissives, by their very nature, are easier to control, aren't they? Less likely to question your policies. Less likely to strike when you threaten to take their pensions away.

To close them is to deny the children you claim to be so concerned about a chance to access a truly astonishing range of literature that they couldn't hope to have at home. It is a snobbery to assume that everyone has access to an unlimited Amazon account. As much of a snobbery as assuming we all have access to organically hand-wanked salmon for our dinner parties. Or a Smythson 'Yummy Mummy' notebook.

Or a trust fund. For example. I think you may have heard of them.