David McElroy

Some people love ebook readers. They love the fact that they can have dozens or hundreds of books with them on a small device. With some of those gadgets, the power can last for days or weeks. You can order any book you want and have it immediately instead of going to a store or waiting for it to be shipped for you. That all sounds great. So why don’t I want one?

I’m thinking about this today because of a discussion that took place on my Facebook page Thursday morning. I posted a picture of a tongue-in-cheek display in a bookstore window. It listed the advantages of “real books” over ebooks, pointing out that they don’t need batteries or software upgrades. And so forth.

More than two dozen people quickly “liked” the picture, some just because they liked a clever promotion and some because they prefer “real books,” as I do. A few people chimed in to argue the superiority of ebooks, explaining that you can get PDFs of books and that you can carry lots of books with you, etc.

Here’s the thing. I understand the technical advantages of ebooks. It’s not that I’ve somehow missed the facts of how they work or what they’re capable of. I don’t need to be “educated” about them. It’s simply that other things matter more to me. For my needs and preferences, real books on real paper matter.

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Buckminster Fuller was an architect, engineer, writer, inventor and futurist, but he was also a rebel who was kicked out of Harvard twice and never finished there. After he was admitted for the second time, he was expelled for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He had no interest in the existing systems and practices he found. He was only interested in inventing the future — in bringing to life the vision he saw in his own mind.

Fuller saw different ways of designing and engineering buildings, among other things. He didn’t try to convince architects and engineers that their conventional designs were wrong. He didn’t care about fighting them. He simply went about the work of inventing what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was very conscious of this approach.

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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After a federal judge ordered the New York City Police Department to stop violating the rights of innocent people, all NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg could do was whine about the potential dangers of respecting the rights of the innocent.

For more than a decade, New York City police have randomly stopped pedestrians and questioned them, then frisked them for weapons. Bloomberg defends the program as saving lives, but he doesn’t understand that we have constitutional rights that protect us against unreasonable searches. He doesn’t get to decide when to ignore our rights.

Since 2004, NYC police have made 4.4 million stops and frisked 2.3 million people. Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin noted in her ruling that no weapons were found in 98.5 percent of the frisks. That means that nearly all of those 2.3 million people searched for weapons were innocent — and the searches took place without cause and without any guilt on their part.

Under the NYC program, there didn’t have to be any reason to suspect anyone. Police were encouraged to search more and more people — and the real-world results have been that the vast majority of those searched have been young black and Hispanic men. The judge called it a form of racial profiling.

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