Overdue notice: defend our libraries.

• Author: D'Ambrosio, Antonino
• Position: Column

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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.--Cicero

I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD WHEN I got my first library card. I remember the day as clearly as any early memory I equate with being free. The card was like a golden key that unlocked the doors of the past, present, and future. In the library, I felt alive in every corner of the world. It provided opportunities otherwise denied my hamlet of working class immigrants, caulking the gaps left by an inadequate education and narrow possibilities. It's where I learned to dream of alternatives. It was my personal workshop where I could craft my own ideas about life.

And my experience was by no means unique.

Edward Paulino, a professor of history at John Jay College in New York, grew up in the cramped, economically depressed, largely immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side. "I found refuge in my local public library," he says. "Public libraries are the urban equivalent of public parks. Just as tracts of land were designated for use by everyday folks and not the elite, the public library represents the same function. It's so free and democratic. It's a kind of club where everyone can be a member and you don't need any kind of security clearance."

The public library is a wholly American invention advocating self-determination. While Europeans established subscription libraries a century before the formation of the United States, the people of Peterborough, New Hampshire, established the first public library in April 1833 (the Boston Public Library, America's first large public library, was not legally established until 1852). Everyone had access to the town's collective knowledge, regardless of income. The only requirement: Return the materials in good condition and on time so that others may benefit. Since then, the library has become a key pillar in a free people's participation in democracy.

"I like to refer to public libraries as the most democratic of the institutions government has created," says Molly Raphael, the president of the American Library Association. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, considered the father of libraries, saw them as "social libraries" where all people were free to participate and share.

Yet today, in the wake of an inexhaustible economic crisis and the reactionary assault on everything public, the public library is under attack.

Local governments across the United States--from New York City to Detroit, and from Denver to Seattle-are slashing library budgets and dosing libraries. This threatens to wall off knowledge, restrict access to the Internet, and shutter a valuable communal meeting place. This year, nineteen...