Rivkah's Rambles

I had the good fortune to speak to a fantastic group of librarians at a great conference, "From City Center to the Exurbs: Trends in Public Library Realities." I think of it as the "Bernie Conference" because Bernard Vavrek is the brains behind it. It's great fun and it was a pleasure to hear George Needham, Denise Davis (Director of Research and Statistics for ALA), Andrea Michaels, and others. I had fun talking about all the things I believe about partnerships and collaborations, but my true "aha" moment came at the Milwaukee airport on the trip home.

Being a green tea junkie, and having forgotten to take any with me, I hightailed it to Starbucks when my flight landed at MKE to grab a grande. I ended up talking with Robert who was there cleaning around the Starbucks and flirting with the two young women wearing SBUX aprons. Don't know how it happened, but WHAT happened was one of those conversations with someone whom you realize, in a better world, would be a VP in a Fortune 500 company, a guru of some sort, or maybe even a librarian.

Robert is 19 and just that day found out his girlfriend is pregnant. Being a mom, I did my "you have to go to school" lecture. We talked about how hard that will be and how important, and he said he knew he needed to do it because we "are becoming a third world country." Since I use those very words all the time, I felt a little like Will Smith seeing the butterfly tattoo on the woman's neck in "I am Legend." Robert made me wish I had the kind of money that would allow me to say, "I'm going to cover your costs for school and living for six months. As long as you do well, more will be available. Go forth and build the future so we all have hope. We owe it to our past and our future to help you succeed."

While it breaks my heart to think that a 19-year-old worries about our civilization, it also gives me hope. The question is, what can we do about it?