I know this has made every listserv and LIS blog, but it’s worth mentionning again and again. The ALA council passed a resolution against the war in Iraq. It is wonderful news indeed, although, I think it’s over 2 years too late. The Librarians for Peace called for this type of resolution back in 2003:
One would think that the American Library Association (ALA) given an opportunity to express its opposition to what was declared to be imminent war, given an opportunity to protest at least the gross misallocation of the US’ own resources which this fantastically expensive war was known to entail, at a time when it was also known that our deficits were already skyrocketing and that our social, health and educational (including library) sectors were being savagely slashed, that - if not for moral reasons, for purely practical reasons - the American Library Association at its mid-winter 2003 conference in Philadelphia would have stood up and opposed the war.Instead its Council and Executive consciously refused to oppose the war against Iraq, refused to embrace even a tepid, least-common-denominator resolution, based on self-interest alone, created to allow it to ’say no to war’!