I began my career at age 19, and moved from clinical assistant to prevention specialist to health educator over a few years. As such, I am often guided by these roots and by the wisdom of the phrase “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Like you, I am uncertain what the next few years will look like. They could be very different, or they may look mostly the same. As an academic and a student of history, I have decided to take certain precautions, however, and at the risk of sounding alarmist I want to pass along some advice that I was offered for you to consider.
When I entered my doctoral program in Human Sexuality, I was told by an elder in the field, “Start your library. Start it as soon as possible. Collect as much as you can, because when times change, books can be burned, and that knowledge can disappear from universities and schools. If enough of us keep libraries, though, they can’t get erase it all.”
I was struck by this advice, and all the more so when I learned who decides and influences the content of textbooks in the US (conservative boards in Texas--for more read here). I did begin a library, and I encourage all of my students to do the same, both in print and digitally.
As I have observed the growing amount of book banning in the past few years, I have been stepping up the advice to purchase, download, and save as much information as we possibly can to prevent loss of the tremendous amount of knowledge we have gained in the past several decades. In Germany when Sexology (and queerness) was under attack, the burning of the Institute of Sexology wiped out precious knowledge that we can never recover. It may be a cliché that history repeats itself, but it is also true.
We don’t have to be alarmist or paranoid to take precautions to preserve our work, our knowledge base and ultimately our fields in the event of societal upheaval. Download those articles onto those external hard-drives, folks. Buy some more books. Winter may or may not be coming, but it never hurts to be prepared.
