Editor:

Each is entitled to his or her own opinion, but I find that of Fillmer Hevener expressed in his recent guest column (“Advising against the library and debt,” Feb. 5) disturbing. 

Hevener was somehow fortunate enough to have advanced up education’s ladder far enough to have taught at Longwood University. One does not earn the degrees required for that service without having benefitted from intensive library usage and services. Yet he would deny local citizens the same opportunities that he enjoyed? 

Strikingly ironic, especially for someone who spent his life as an educator.

Hevener also suggests that investment in a new and expanded library is unwise because technology might be rendering libraries obsolete (his word, archaic).

He must not have been to a library in recent years. Local libraries are beehives of educational activity such as I have never seen before, if my own county is an example.

Books are not obsolete. And libraries are for all of us on the economic spectrum. The most economically privileged of us cannot afford to have at home all of the educational resources one needs. 

And let us remember that some families need a library to avail themselves of educational resources that others take for granted. What’s wrong with a little caritas?

A community without a library to serve the needs of the citizenry is indeed a poor community, poor maybe by economic standards, but certainly poor in spirit.

Helen P. Warriner-Burke

Amelia