Knowledge is something we all want for our families. How they come about this knowledge is where recent difficulties have arisen. When our governor isn’t tossing buckets of money she got from the federal government to communities, she and her acolytes are complaining about … libraries. I’m guessing we have a good handle on our abysmal scores in maternal and child health-care, education and infrastructure safety, right? Nobody I’ve heard lately out there is saying, “ I wish I could be like Alabama.” Sad, no?

So it came as a pleasant surprise when I fluttered down on an animated conversation on the Square recently. Two young ladies were discussing a fascinating article they’d read about Florie Kelley. In 1866, Florie’s father introduced her to a library book with an illustration of a tiny child dragging a cart of bricks through a tunnel in England. Her mother was stunned, and said no child should see such a picture at her daughter Florie’s tender age of 7. “No,” father replied, “she should know that is part of the world she would grow into.” As it was, young Florie grew to become one of the greatest advocates for the elimination of child labor in the United States. She learned something of her world from that picture. The open communication with her father helped her discover that some things were important to know. Knowledge, she discovered, can with time and thought become wisdom.

A Jewish synagogue in Huntsville was recently the victim of an email bomb threat. It is instructive to know that books on the Holocaust, such as the Pulitzer Prize winning “MAUS” and even “Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank,” have been targeted for banning from some libraries. Too much violence in “MAUS”; too much sex in “Anne Frank.” Baffling. We read books about such horrors so they don’t happen again. Anne Frank wrote when she was coming of age at 13. These stories help show what can happen in the world we are living in, and don’t want to see happen again. Further bannings happen to books about other groups, it is a good thing to know and try to understand them, because they have a place in our world, too. A book is a good place to start. We can learn about history, and how people have been set upon and harmed over the centuries. This will at least help stop forms of prejudice, bigotry, or even bomb threats or worse.

I’ve always thought that feathering your own nest is something only we owl’s worried about. Then I discovered that here some think that keeping something forbidden, hidden, out of sight, out of mind, is a way to get away from real problems. For 100 years after the Civil War, Blacks have been treated not only as second-class citizens, but shot, whipped and tortured away from voting to change their status. Today keeping them in their place is just a little more sophisticated. Thus we have voting districts drawn by the governing party that have to go to court because they violate civil rights; rights which we should all hope can be equally shared by everyone in this state. That’s why we want books on this subject to be available so our young people can gain knowledge of our history, and help improve our world to a place where even our faiths and beliefs seem to direct us. When the young grow up and find out they’ve been denied access to something which would make them more mature, more caring, they resent it. How else to explain why many leave churches in droves these days, with fully 30 percent of adults claiming no adherence to organized religion? If I have access to a book which explains about an outsider group, why do we pretend that this is some secret plot to “groom” young people to do something? Information is not conversion. They might even learn that some facts of life are inherent, not learned or taught. Better to understand, rather than pre-judge.

Nobody should be afraid of something which appears in a library. In fact, a wise owl once said if you are worried about free public libraries, maybe it is time to wonder what else might be more important. We’ve had libraries since Ben Franklin thought they’d be a good idea for a free people. After all, we have bridges to reinforce or correct. We have a medical system that doesn’t take care of those who need it most. Here in our town we have sewage and drainage problems, not to mention areas where no wi-fi exists for a modern county.

Time to get away from prohibition. Let’s quit worrying about little made up culture war problems, because there are plenty of real problems to fix. If some politicians are trying to scare you about library holdings, maybe it is because they have no idea how to take care of real problems. They seem to be saying, as in the famous library book, “Ignore the man behind the curtain! I am the Great and Powerful Oz!”