Kieran’s notes from the back room :
Do you remember (back in the age of the dinosaur) in grade school getting a gold star for good behavior? Ours wasn’t gold stars per se, but the idea was a reward for good behavior – good citizenship. As an adult, the reward for good citizenship is more ambiguous. Sure, they do hand out stickers proclaiming “I Voted” at the polls, but for the most part the ‘carrot’ of a gold star sticker is replaced by the ’stick’ of fines, tickets, jail and adulthood. I try and think of citizenship in broad terms both local and global. Believe it or not, I have pondered what it means for me to be a citizen of our town, our nation and the world. I try to make my town – my neighborhood better, because I live here. I take it as a given that part of being a citizen is building on the strengths or doing all one can to reverse the shortfalls of the communities and the nation in which we live. Of course there is no single path to good citizenship. Just like in grade school, good citizenship isn’t just academics or sharing of pencils. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that our country thrives because it gives us all the chance to interpret our place in it in our own fashion. Those who work hard and focus on raising a family or on becoming experts in their field contribute just as surely as those who tutor in schools, organize rallies to fight some injustice or volunteer to protect U.S. interests abroad.
So, two things happened this week that got me thinking about citizenship. First, I was at the Fremont Middle School. See, the school is having an incentive program for “Kids doing the right thing”. The seventh grade team has asked the library to partner with them for a video game extravaganza. Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution and Skate It are the video games that will reward the positive efforts of the seventh grade. The second was a report I read by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA found that the percentage of Americans who reported reading a novel, a short story, a poem or a play has gone up, from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in the last year – the first increase in that percentage since the NEA began compiling statistics on national reading habits in the 1980s. Justyn Dillingham, opinions editor of the Daily Wildcat, said, “Obviously, an America whose citizens all read for pleasure would not be a perfect America. But it would be a better country than the one we live in now, simply because the values instilled by reading – imagination, skepticism, the capacity for thought – are also the values of citizenship.” As a librarian I am pro-reading (probably you knew that already). And I see these connections between reading and citizenship (it was nice to see an op-ed piece with the same idea). I see connections between imagination, technical literacy and reading. I believe in literacy beyond text. So I propose a reward for all us adults who have maintained our good citizenship over these past years. Yeah, you guessed it – the library! Come to the library and reward yourself with a novel, DVD, CD, program, internet, comic book, or video game. Of course you can always stop by the back room and say hi to me.
