[[this from the cover story in this week’s Nashville Scene—a small section talking about a board meeting at the Marshall County Memorial Library in Lewisburg]]
“Every month, the library board meets in a windowless, cinderblock room behind the checkout counter. When they met in September, it was most definitely not business as usual.
That’s because Robin Minor showed up. Minor, a social studies teacher at a nearby public school, was infuriated that Spanish-language books were being made available at the library. A round, doughy white man with a small brushy mustache, his hair parted severely to the right and plastered to his skull, Minor stood in pleated khakis, tugging the sagging waist of his pants upward as he addressed the small group of about a dozen library board members. Next to him hung a painting of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
“There shouldn’t be any Spanish-language books in this li-bary,” Minor said. “I would like to see a policy that if somebody is going to donate a book to this li-bary, where English has been the dominant language since 1836, let’s make those books be donated in English only.”
His diatribe lasted for perhaps two minutes, punctuated by the frequent refrain, “There shouldn’t be no books in here that I can’t read.”
Eventually, the board’s president, John Rawe, spoke up. Rawe, a kindly looking older gentleman with long limbs and cowboy boots, pointed out that the Spanish-language collection was very small. He said that the library had books in many languages, including French, Japanese, Yiddish, Swahili and Russian. It is, after all, a library.”
(this went on and on, but you get the gist. another woman says she’s not going to use the library as long as hispanics are using it. is our country really taking a dive or has it always been populated largely by narrow-minded bigoted pinheads with no concept of history? i guess that’s meant to be rhetorical... same ignorant hatred, different day.
Ay mi dios...)
