Sadness at the State of the US, the World, and Librarianship

First, there's no update to the stress of online librarianship. (Other than have an issue with the access to a series of journals needed by students...and dealing with the emails through time zones with all the delays that ensued. Problem finally solved!) Life online is sad because I do not get to see the faces of the students, more onerous due to the need to create, edit, and publish the videos AFTER creating the activity, and lonely.

Now on to the topic for this blog.

Today I made a difficult decision to leave a professional group I have been part of for awhile. I did this because the tone of the group has changed from helpful ideas, support, and answering questions to politics, name-calling, and labeling people based on a one sentence comment to a post. (No one should ever be labeled sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-religion, or anti-ANYTHING based on a sentence. Don't we teach children that you cannot infer tone or meaning from online comments? Unless the person has said "All __(fill-in-the-blank with a group or class of people)___ deserve to die/don't deserve to live/should all be removed from the face of the Earth/etc.," you cannot know what is in their heart and mind.

Whatever happened to giving someone the benefit of the doubt? Or asking politely for clarification to the meaning of their words? We all know what we mean by things we say, but sometimes there is (to paraphrase Dr. Adolph Brown) disconnect between our brains and our mouths (or our fingertips as online speaking dictates). They might not realize they worded their comment poorly and the implications that could arise from it. Give them a chance to clarify and edit!

So what happened?

First, George Floyd was murdered. Pure and simple as that. Was is racially motivated? We don't know because we don't know what was going through that #$%@*& 's mind when he murdered Mr. Floyd.

What do we know?

• The officer and Mr. Floyd worked at the same nightclub. They had overlapping shifts. They may or may not have interacted. (The owner of the club first reported they worked together and knew each other. She later said they may have known each other, but she is not sure.)
• Mr. Floyd was being restrained until EMS arrived.
• The restraint technique used by the officer (for some ABSOLUTELY INSANE REASON) is TAUGHT and APPROVED by that police department as an appropriate technique. WHY? WHO APPROVED THAT? It's insane and wrong in ANY situation.

Now, with regards to the riots, when someone can explain to me how burning a business that had NOTHING to do with the murder gets Mr. Floyd justice, then I can understand the reason behind them. At what point does breaking into a store and stealing big screen TVs get him justice? Oh, wait. THAT DOESN'T GET HIM JUSTICE. It's unlawful. Being angry does not allow you to go on a  rampage, burn, loot, and destroy. For this I blame our culture that allows this type of behavior for many different things, including sports victories! It's so harmful! (Then when people are recognizing some of the rioters pictures, it is coming out that many of them were BUSED into the city to encourage rioting. Does this have anything to do with the recently leaked Friends of Democracy papers that were the cause of the Baltimore riots? Time will tell.)

Now how does this lead to my resignation from a professional librarian's group?

In that group, someone posted videos of the riots and commented how it was justified behavior. The tone inferred by some members was that the original poster was saying, as one rioter told a reporter, that all whites should be afraid because it was coming to them next. Is that what the original poster meant? I hope not! However, when people took offense, rather than asking for clarification and a civilized discourse, the original poster labeled all of them racist. Politics and profanity then became part of the discussion. The post was removed, but the subsequent posts by the original poster in which she continues to label anyone who disagrees with the rioters as racist have been left up.

At this point, I have realized there is nothing left for me to learn from this group. We, as librarians, should know about bias, inferences, stating opinions, and working with different viewpoints. We should allow all to comment in a risk-free environment in which clarification can be sought if something seems "off" in the way it is worded. No one should be attacked for having a difference of opinion.

Rather than argue, at the detriment of my name and my reputation, I simply and quietly left.