Our libraries finally opened. We’d been putting books on hold for four months. Once a week we’d pull into the parking space, call the hotline, relay our library card number, pop our trunk, and wait for a gloved and masked (G&M) librarian to deliver the goods.
So we were excited to get our summer reading rewards in person, the kids having logged a million minutes (or something like that). My kids love the library.
Those of us older than ten masked ourselves and we strode into the common area. Coincidentally, the library had been completely renovated and we were oohing and ahhing the remodel as we made our way to the front desk. A terse G&M librarian pointed us to the shelf where the treasure laid, kids’ eye level, labeled with a green tape: DO NOT TOUCH.
“Each child may pick two books for their prize, but don’t touch them. Make your selection and I’ll give you a copy,” she explained.
Well. If that isn’t a cool rain on our sunny, book-fanatic parade. Also, try and tell a four year old girl she can only look at, and not touch the Fancy Nancy book she has just earned for her summer trouble. It only took a fat second for my littlest kids to reach out and touch the shelf, to stroke the shiny surface of a paperback. It was as natural as, say, going to the library.
But the selection wasn’t even that good.
The G&M librarian swiftly descended.
“Ah, ah!” She tsked. “I’m going to have to quarantine those now!”
I quickly ushered my children back toward the front door.
“But we haven’t got our prizes yet!” they protested.
“We’ll get ice cream instead,” I said.
We piled into the van and I confessed to my kids I was a little angry.
“Why?” they sweetly asked.
“Because I think kids should be allowed to touch books in the library,” I told them.
In July, I began homeschooling in earnest.
Well, sort of.
I found a free “Bill of Rights for kids” printable online and made two copies for the big boys. It was a quickie, afternoon foray into worksheets post-Covid-shutdown. It was worth having them write just to see how much our poor penmanship has suffered from minimal use, but I needed a reminder for me and my kids: what, exactly, are our rights? Where, exactly, is the line drawn? Who had what in mind when these tenets were written two hundred years ago?
I wanted them to be reminded of what Jonathan Swift wrote and our forefathers echoed in the Declaration of Independence, that government without the consent of the governed is nothing more than slavery. Our Declaration boldly declares if “any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government…”
Thirteen states had to whittle down a Bill of Rights they could all agree on, and these are the most basic, collectively valued, human desires expressed by a baby nation.
They ring true today: I want to worship in a manner I see fit, I want to defend my family, I want a safe home, I want to send my kids to school, and dang it, I want to touch the library books.
You’re telling me I can go to the grocery store and handle all the apples, pull my germy cell phone from my back pocket to double check my list and coupons, touch the cart with my bare hands, pay with cash that’s been who-knows-where–but I can’t walk into my tax-supported library and pick up a book? Seems shady. It doesn’t get my consent.
Seems like we have grounds for terminating this sack of rotting modern policy.
Alas, this is what the world-turned-upside-down looks like today. I do believe we are 180 degrees from the direction we were headed in 1776. We are imploding, destroying ourselves. Consent of the governed, i.e. taxation without representation, is a nifty old phrase we’ve put away with yesterday’s knickers and powdered wigs. You and I–we cannot rely on the words penned by our forefathers, because haters would burn it in a moment if they could. We are held hostage, unable to defend our “consent of the governed”, unable to abolish the overreach of government, because the enemy has come from among us.
If I thought screaming and protesting would do it, I’d be right out there with the lot of them. But the colonial people were wiser: they simply refused to participate in Britain’s blatant disregard for their consent. They simmered, but they didn’t boil over. In the middle of the night they dumped the tea right off the ship.
We have to be just as calculating. Our surest, most defiant resistance will not come in the form of outrageous, disrespectful bursts of violence. Our best, most noble cause now is quietly educating our children. While the world is dark we are throwing seeds in the ground. We are raising the next generation of arrows in God’s quiver. We’ve got to train them to spot inconsistencies and defend what is true.
This focus, for me, is becoming sharp in my mind.
So I am not so hopeless when I think of homeschool. Circumstances are never outside of God’s control–I am just apt to whine and carry on when I don’t get what I want. But then I can usually come around to His point of view. This school year, I am spurred on to review as much civics as possible (hey, surprise, surprise, a state standard!–how much longer before citizenship is disparaged?) and indoctrinate (yep, you heard that right) my children into a higher way of living as the 4-Hers say, “for my community, my country, and my world.”
And as much as I feel at odds with our library system, for the moment I can get my books via car pick-up, as long as my children don’t dare breathe on the gloved and masked librarians.
We will eat ice cream as we read the pages. We will celebrate, because freedom is not so easily wrestled from those who give no consent to take it.
