Thread by @EpsilonTheory

“What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology – and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal.”

Make. Protect. Teach. has something to say about this.

nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opi…

1 day after publication, this note has 2500 comments, almost all tsk-tsk’ng the locals in one way or another. Some of them are much harsher than that.

I get it. I feel the same way. It makes me ANGRY and SAD that this rural county does not support the local library.

Then again, this library is a freakin’ Taj Mahal that cost MILLIONS in a REALLY poor county. And now the locals are ANGRY and SAD that they must pay MOAR to keep it.

We’re ALL angry and sad, Arkansas locals and NYT readers alike, and we are ALL justified in our feelings.

And then it hit me.

We are ALL being played. These emotions are done TO us. Intentionally.

Here’s the game.

None of us – not the Arkansas locals, not the author of the note, not the readers of the note – can IMAGINE a local library that is not built by government and maintained by taxes.

It’s not that we can’t execute on a plan or that we don’t have the resources to build a library separate from gov’t. Those things may be true, but that’s not the game. That’s not how we’re played.

The game is to prevent us from IMAGINING a library separate from gov’t.

Should governments build libraries? Of course!

AND.

And WE should build libraries. And WE should maintain them.

Does this Arkansas community have a WE with the desire to maintain their library? Nope.

And that’s okay.

We got this.

By ‘we’ I may not mean you. You may not want to be part of this ‘we’. And that’s okay, too.

There IS a ‘we’ for this. It just needs a Pack.

A $1m endowment w/ a 5% real return can fund the librarian this county needs. Forever. $100m can fund 100 librarians. $1b can fund 1,000 librarians. Forever.

Imagine the good that 1,000 librarians across the country could achieve, year in and year out.

Imagine THAT.

Who prevents us from imagining this?

Americans gave $6.5 billion to national political candidates in 2016.

That’s who.

We are TOLD that the “real” story of this Arkansas county library is something-something about Trump. That’s it’s something-something about Republicans and Democrats.

The Arkansas locals believe this. The NYT readers believe this. The author of the note believes this.

This framing is DESIGNED to make us angry and sad.

This framing is DESIGNED to make us give Them our $6.5 billion, yes, but even more so it is DESIGNED to make us give Them our MINDFULNESS.

They keep us sick, you know. They keep us hooked on this framing, in a political version of Munchausen-by-proxy.

The cure? Take back your distance.

You’ll find your local library to be the perfect place to do that.

epsilontheory.com/things-fall-ap…

Make. Protect. Teach.

It’s a reframing of the political, without the … you know … politics.

Imagine that.

epsilontheory.com/the-long-now-p…