Time to think, and rethink...

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. The thing is, I have been determined not to post anything depressing or self-pitying. But being on strike--especially as the days drag on into weeks--is depressing. And it can lead to a certain amount of self pity too.

When the strike started, I tried to imagine just what it would feel like over time. Sure, I expected peaks and valleys in the membership's morale, moments of feeling powerless, other moments of feeling elated, and that unique thrill that comes from fighting for a cause. (I marched in a few demonstrations as a kid, and it was exhilerating. These days you get pepper-sprayed or tear-gassed for that stuff.) I also expected that lots of us would be looking at job postings, some of us would be out there picking up dead-end part-time jobs to pay our rent, and some of us just wouldn't be coming back. But expecting something and actually experiencing it are different things.

For example, I'm hearing about more and more colleagues who have taken jobs outside of our library system, and even outside of libraries. This makes me feel sadder than I would have thought. It's a loss to our library and to libraries overall. But it also makes perfect sense. For the first time since I finished library school, I've also been asking myself if it's time to rethink working in this profession. Being on strike doesn't just shake your faith in yourself, I'm discovering. It also shakes your faith in the kind of work you do. If shutting down a library system for six weeks doesn't seem to matter very much to our public, why should it matter to me? Was I just kidding myself for all those years when I thought what I did was important? Was I really fighting for access to information, intellectual freedom, literacy, helping new immigrants/children/families/the disabled/the disenfranchised, and all that lofty stuff, or was I just helping to keep a building open so that middle-class people could come in to hang out and study and borrow books and DVDs for free? Not to say that those things aren't valuable, but if that's all we're doing, it's no wonder that the community is managing just fine without us.

So I've been scanning the job postings too, and not just for other libraries (as I've always done, mainly out of curiousity), but also in the other fields where I've worked and trained. Maybe it's time to do something else altogether. Maybe it's even time to find a job that doesn't consume all my time and energy. If there's a silver lining to the big black cloud of this strike, it's that I have a little more time with my daughter, who is starting kindergarten next week. Should I be looking for work I can do from home (even partly), or that gives me more vacation? Who needs me more, my family or this public who apparently hasn't missed us all that much while we've been gone?

Yes, I'm feeling disillusioned.

I also keep thinking about that Simpsons episode, Mr Lisa goes to Washington, where--after seeing a politician take a bribe--Lisa suddenly loses faith in American democracy. Once the word gets out that a little girl no longer believes, the entire US government swings into action, whips themselves into shape, and actually enacts various other cliches to prove to her that the democratic system isn't all a terrible lie. So I am holding onto a very silly dream that somewhere someone (in the ALA, maybe?) is worrying about us striking library workers. In response to our loss of faith, somebody is going to descend, from the heavens, from the larger library world, from the government or the community somewhere, to tell us that we do matter, and that the world does care, that the public does love us as much as we've always thought they did. Or not.