Why Is The Buffalo Library System Begging For Funds While The Military-Industrial Complex Always – No Questions Asked – Gets Every Blood-Letting Dollar It Wants?

By Doug Draper

 “I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”

~ the late American  astronomer Carl Sagan

Apparently former U.S. president George W. Bush never actually said ‘go shopping or the terrorists win’ in words spoken quite that starkly, as much as some of my more liberal friends still want to believe he did.

But in an address to his nation in the month following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush said something that pretty well kissed that mythical line and it went like; “People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshipping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball games. Life in America is going forward, and as the fourth grader who wrote me knew, that is the ultimate repudiation of terrorism.”

Isn’t it too bad that instead of just talking about working, shopping, playing and going to places of worship, then-President Bush had also told his fellow citizens and the rest of the world that continuing to invest in such vital public services as libraries, schools and other public institutions and infrastructure is also a repudiation of terrorism.

Indeed,  one might make a strong case that the terrorists win if these pillars of common good are stripped of funding in favour of, let’s say, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost more than a trillion dollars and counting in American treasure (not to mention the lives wounded and lost), while libraries, schools and other domestic services continue to suffer a death by a thousand cuts.

 Case in point is the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library System. A few days before this Christmas, that system was given a kind of stay of executing from making even more cuts to its services with an 11th hour restoration of $3 million in funding from the Erie County government. It is funding that will at least allow the system to meet what its chair, Sharon Thomas, called “minimum stands” of service at the system’s 37 branches.

But how long will that last before this library system, crowned by a central library in downtown Buffalo containing archives that are a treasure trove of history of interest to residents on both sides of our binational border, is back before the Erie County legislature, begging for funding again to stave off more diminishing of its services? And how come the Pentagon and military industrial complex never seems to have to come before government, cap in hand, justifying funding for its services?

Do we really need to be spending countless billions of dollars more building aircraft carriers and new attack jets (and Canada now has a government into that mentality too) when the real threat is a psycho climbing aboard a jet or subway car with explosives in his or her underwear? In the meantime, Osama bin Laden, if he is still alive, must be off in a cave in Pakistan somewhere having belly laughs while America (and again, we might just as well include Canada) spends its treasure fighting ancient wars in the Middle East, at tremendous expense to our domestic educational and other needs, because our governments haven’t even the guts to ask their citizens to pay for them with a war tax.

Meanwhile, China and India are investing their money in educating their future generations to take their countries forward as the super nations of the 21st centuries. I believe that someday, maybe long after you and I are gone, historians will conclude that the decision to fight futile 20th century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of spending our treasure on sustaining our educational and other vital public services contributed to the decline and fall of the United States and Canada as leading nations in the world.

(Visit Niagara At Large at http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)