After a hectic day spent blogging and comment-blogging about national issues, there’s nothing like a Geno’s cheesesteak to turn one’s mind towards local affairs.

Yesterday, I went down to City Hall to protest the proposed budget cuts for Philadelphia’s Free Library system. The cuts would transform twenty local branches — many in impoverished areas — into “Express” Libraries that would be open four hours a day and would be serviced not by trained librarians but by hourly employees with no advanced training in library science (they would be required to have only a high school degree). The local library in my neighborhood has already made this transition: it is open from 1-5 Monday to Saturday, which means that it closes soon after children get out of school.

As the Inquirer reports, 200 raucous bibliophiles showed up to protest these changes. Librarians talked about the social services and learning opportunities that libraries provide in their neighborhoods; kids from after-school programs spoke about libraries as safe shelters they could visit when problems at home or at school became too overwhelming; local activists emphasized programs for ESL students and senior citizens, and mentioned the importance of free internet access in Philly, where 41% of City households do not have home computers; and staffers from Friends of the Free Library gave concrete financial reasons why these cuts were bad for the long-term fiscal health of the city.

The members of the City Council expressed solidarity with the protesters, and repeatedly mentioned that they had allocated $1 million dollars for the library system. The Council, however, has no way to force the Mayor to spend that money on its intended target.

Councilman Michael Nutter, who called for the hearings, emphasized the need for continued public action on this issue:

Many protestors at the hearing carried signs; mine, I am sure, was the only one that mentioned blogging:

Few, if any, of the 200 people there knew what a blogger was or what blogging had to do with the city library system (and to be honest, I was more than a little embarrassed by my own sign). But they should, because blogging — and netroots sites like Philly Future — has the potential to empower local citizens’ groups on issues such as this. Who else will speak for the affected communities? Denied the pathways towards education that libraries provide, they may soon be unable to speak for themselves.

Anyone who has read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave knows that the most effective tool nineteenth-century slave-owners had in their arsenal of oppression was their denial of the alphabet to their slaves. In a famous passage, Douglass recounted a conversation he overheard between his master and his master’s wife:

The Free Library of Philadelphia holds thirty-seven titles by Frederick Douglass. But children living in ignorance of them will not find such guides to freedom if library doors are locked.

And in a time when our own national government is engaging in blatant propaganda, an ignorant populace is a populace that is enslaved.

If you think that I am exaggerating the problem, consider this: one librarian at the hearings told a story of a Philadelphia high-school senior who attended an after school program in Roxborough. After hearing someone refer to Hitler during a roundtable discussion, the child asked, “Who was Hitler?” A senior in high school. The librarian walked right out to the shelves in the library and gave the student a stack of books to read over.

The issues involved in this battle have nothing to do with city financing. If the state of Pennsylvania can give over $300 million for new sports stadiums, surely it can find $5 million dollars to keep the doors of its libraries open. Nothing less than the economic and intellectual freedom of its most vulnerable citizens is at stake.

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