What’s next? What is the next restriction that the Library Board will place on our search for inspiration, education, and information? We have given them the power to govern, and they have transformed it into a power to control. Their arrogance restricts our education, our curiosity, and our spiritual growth.
Truth pursued, not truth possessed, is the mission of an individual’s search for knowledge, information, wisdom, and enlightenment. Our Library Board and the Flathead commissioners are restricting our search. They are claiming the right to curtail our search for knowledge by blocking information that is available to us in an institution that is supported by our taxes and contributions. More than that. They are restricting our freedom of thought.
What’s more, their elimination of the books we can read is not new. In my lifetime, I witnessed this kind of arrogance on a dark night in Germany. Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, when Jewish businesses were destroyed, and their freedoms revoked. That same night, there were book burnings in the streets of the cities. Restricting people’s minds has been the first step in dictatorship throughout history.
Election to office is a privilege. It is not a right to govern our ideas, our information, our creativity, our speech, our communication, or our sense of right and wrong. Flathead residents have come together in the past to defeat this arrogance of control and to support those threatened because of their beliefs. We are coming together once more under the same banner of freedom of expression.
You have all betrayed our trust.
Ina Albert
Whitefish