It is National Library Week, a week intended to celebrate libraries. That seems more than a little ironic, given the seemingly constant and profound attacks ongoing against education, information, equity of access and need for truth in the world that surrounds us today.

Public libraries exist explicitly to provide access to information — knowledge — to the public of every age, in every demographic and subset. But there are forces active in our world today that seek to destroy that foundation. They want to make it harder, if not impossible, to find information that they don’t like, leading to truths with which they are uncomfortable. They want to attack and criminalize librarians who exist as the guardians of that knowledge and who seek explicitly to open those vistas of wisdom and learning to all who come through their doors.

Enough is enough. A country which purports to enshrine freedom of speech, whose founding fathers — whatever their flaws — so praised knowledge and understanding, must not allow itself to unmake the institutions whose purpose is to be the very embodiment of those ideals.

Support and defend your libraries and librarians while you still can, against all enemies foreign and domestic.

E. David Miller, of Frederick, Md.