We love libraries.

They offer a common meeting ground for the community. They provide a way for people of all sorts to pursue their interests, whatever they may be. They enable especially young people a chance to learn about the worlds beyond their own.

These words from Emily Dickinson have always rung true for us:
 

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –
 

Each summer libraries across the state follow a theme for summer reading. The idea is to keep kids engaged in learning over vacation, and many of our libraries encourage adults to participate, too.

We are particularly fond of this year’s theme: All Together Now.

We consider this a timely and even courageous sentiment. Our nation is splintered — some might lament that our democracy has broken beyond repair.

But not our local librarians. They work away at including everyone in their selections of books and movies and in their activities that include all kids.

Each library is free to develop the summer reading theme in its own way. We are thrilled every week when the columns from our library correspondents arrive in our email and we can read about what each of our widely diverse eight libraries is doing — what concerts they are hosting, what art they are displaying, what activities they are offering.

The Guilderland Public Library, for example, has developed a camping theme for summer readers. Adult readers who log at least 10 books have a chance to win a camping kit.

At the Bethlehem Public Library, the focus is on “kindness, friendship, and unity,” writes correspondent Kristen Roberts in her weekly column. Last week, she sent us a picture of a mural of hands that readers had made, each with messages of encouragement.

 “Change the World” said large letters among the many colored construction-paper hands. “We all grow together,” said one hand. Another had a heart. A third had a flower. Were they waving hello in greeting? Were they reaching for the unreachable?

This week, Roberts sent us a photograph she took of Noelle Diamond — a man dressed as a woman, hair carefully coiffed, makeup expertly applied — reading at an all-ages drag story hour.

We love the way Roberts, an excellent photographer, framed the picture. Diamond is front and center, dressed in a shiny school-bus-yellow dress with epaulets that look like a school bus’s flashing red lights on her shoulders.

One of the activities she led was having kids sing “The Wheels on the Bus,” writes Roberts, and Diamond also read “stories that encouraged acceptance and kindness.”

Behind Diamond and the big yellow bow on top of her head, is a large poster depicting, in the abstract, people of different ages, ethnicities, races, religions, and abilities with these words in large letters at the top: Libraries Are For Everyone.

On the same day, we received this week’s column from Luanne Nicholson at the Guilderland Public Library, which, in addition to its camp theme, has a strong undercurrent of the American pastime — baseball. (We suspect this is because the library’s director used to be the director of research at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and can perform “Casey at the Bat” so it makes your skin tingle.)

Nicholson’s column starts by announcing that “everyone’s favorite local mascot, Southpaw from the Tri-City ValleyCats,” will be at the library on July 21 for an all-ages “special baseball-themed story time,” which “all are welcome to attend.”

This of course will feature a man or perhaps a woman — really, who can tell? — dressed up in a fur suit wearing a ValleyCat jersey and cap and no doubt giant sneakers.

But the Guilderland story time has not caused protesters and supporters to show up when library trustees meet, as happened in Bethlehem. And we suspect that everyone who comes to the July 21 story time in Guilderland won’t be either for or against the person dressed up like a cat; they will simply be enjoying the stories that he or she or they read.

We’re not so naive as to think these situations are entirely parallel. We understand of course that drag performers feel like a threat to some in a way that a person in a cat suit does not.

Why should this be? Why must we be such a rigidly binary society that we see anyone who doesn’t fit squarely into the category of male or female as a threat? Or as someone to be stopped or hated or spurned?

Families come in different forms and so do children.

An enlightening documentary currently playing at area theaters — “Every Body” directed by Julie Cohen — features three articulate activists, Alicia Roth Weigel, Sean Saifa Wall, and River Gallo, who are intersex, born with both female and male sex traits.

The medical hierarchy and society at large forced them as children to be either male or female. Their true identities and sense of self emerged only through their own courage in discovering their true selves — and then taking on their shoulders the burden of trying to enlighten others.

Many Americans have a basic misunderstanding that humans are born either as men, with XYchromosomes, or as women, with XX chromosomes.

The idea of just two sexes is not only simplistic, it is incorrect. For years, biologists have recognized there is a wider spectrum than that — in addition to the syndromes in which people are born with XXY or XYY, or XO chromosomes. Some researchers now say that as many as one person in 100 has some form of DSD or differences in sex development.

The documentary “Every Body” opens with a series of clips from recent gender-reveal parties where couples announce with everything from blue confetti to pink smoke who their about-to-be baby will be. As one of the activists in the film advises: Why not just celebrate having a baby?

Parents don’t have to bring their children to story hours they don’t feel comfortable with. But for families who want their children to understand different kinds of people, diverse readers are valuable.

So are diverse books.

We are living in an era when book-banning has become politicized. Under the guise of protecting others’ children, some groups are striving to limit access to valuable books.

The most frequent targets of bans are books about race, gender, and sexuality. To have a library where children can only read about or hear from white, Christian, bisexual people does not reflect reality.

It is particularly harmful to youth who don’t fit those categories. Last year, we were inspired by a conversation we had with Beth Davis, the long-time librarian at Berne-Knox-Westerlo.

“There are students who have friends who are gay or lesbian or bisexual, and they want to learn more about their friend,” said Davis. One of the ways they do this is through reading books. Davis believes it is important for the BKW library to have “books for everybody” — and so do we.

Even at the youngest age, children can see if the adults around them are accepting of others.

Like Davis, we think it is a parent’s prerogative to keep their child from reading a particular book — or attending a certain story time. “It’s when you’re going to say, ‘Nobody has a right to read this,’ I will step up and say, ‘Wait. Wait. Fine for your own child … but another student needs to read that book really badly,” said Davis. “They’re in a place where they need that book.’”

In addition to students wanting to learn about their gender identification, Davis has had students “thinking about other religions,” she said, or students in the rural district who “want to know inner-city life.”

When Davis was going through the rough middle-school years herself, she said she felt then — and still feels now: “Books can be your friend. Books can keep you company. Books can show you the rest of the world.”

That doesn’t mean everything in a book is good anymore than everything in a friend is good.

“My job,” said Davis, “is both to find books for students and connect students with books that, one, can show them they’re not alone, and also show that there are other people out there, other places, people who are different, may have different religions, different beliefs, different cultures.”

Davis referred to a thought from Rudine Sims Bishop — librarians need to provide books that are both windows and mirrors. Bishop, who has been referred to as the mother of multicultural children’s literature, has written:

“Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author.

“When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

“You need to be able to look in a mirror and see yourself in a book,” said Davis. “But you also need to be able to look through a window and see others and the rest of the world and love that.”

Libraries should be safe places where we can learn about others, where we can explore worlds wider than our own. Rather than labeling those who are different from us as a threat, we can seek to understand them. Keeping out people or books we don’t agree with means we will never have conversations about new ideas or reach new levels of understanding.

So we applaud our quietly courageous libraries and encourage them to stay the course through these turbulent times. Our future as a democracy and as a civil society depends on it.

As the banner pictured on our library pages over Noelle Diamond reading a book at story time says:  Libraries Are For Everyone. So, too, is the United States of America for everyone.