Rough economic times leave people scrambling for ideas about how to improve things. But things never improve by constricting the minds and imaginations of a city’s people. If anything, in such times we need libraries more than ever.

A library is a safe and free place for believing in Chicago. Funding cuts made to this great city organization is a strangling of a billion voices in our books, and of the people who work for and read and value the body of our knowledge. If that body is not treated as sacred we disgrace creation and every faith and lack thereof. A library is a house that keeps all of us.

Libraries offer more than just books, more than just e-books and audiobooks. They offer resources to job seekers, encouragement to struggling readers — and, yes, a place for the poorest Chicagoans to come in out of the cold. They are community centers in the truest and most necessary sense. Libraries have been such a reliable resource to me that libraries and librarians always play a role in my novels.

Yes, we need to save money. But cutting library budgets will cost us more in the long run.

The public library in Enid, Oklahoma, the land of my birth, was both sanctuary and garden. Located on Maine Street (which one might expect of a small town civic institution, but not likely the spelling), my best friend Russ and I plotted our then dissonant roadmaps to writing and education via a geekdom borne of spending every hour of Saturday daylight from age 8 to 16 interpreting dreams provided free of charge from books, charts, and librarians. I was home recently for the first time in several years. The library looks almost exactly as it did in my youth, which is both nostalgic and tragic. It speaks to the toxic, yet purveying sentiment that too many politicians, from Chicago to Oklahoma, place such a low value on thought.