Here’s a look at my desk, littered with scrap paper on which I jotted notes (thanks to my ADHD brain). Didn’t note the source of the article I read that spurred the following thoughts on sustainability and swag.

First, about these scraps: Library workers, at least in my experience, were always concerned with sustainability. At 13, as a volunteer library worker, I was asked to chop paper into slips with the paper cutter, so that service desks could write call numbers for patrons¹ or patrons could jot those down themselves.

That said, somewhere, recently I read a critique of swag and how that industry creates cheap, mass produced, sometimes single-use-plastic objects that people toss in the trash.

Why give another person crap? Anyone versed in critical thinking may arrive at similar conclusions about this issue. It likely drives the DIY/handmade gifts groundswell.

But better yet, how does this relate to trauma-informed or trauma-responsive libraries?

Safety: do libraries want to encourage people to use plastic, when there’s clear evidence that plastic is killing us and our world? Why add to this problem?

Can libraries explore alternatives to plastic library cards or ID cards? A saving grace is that they are used multiple times. I remember when library cards were paper stock with a metal piece that circ workers stuck in a machine that franked the card # onto the book’s card. I won’t explain the details of that workflow process; it’s a bit hazy in my brain and I don’t want to share incorrect information, though I remember being a cog in that system decades ago.

Trust/transparency: should our patrons trust us when the swag we give them is directly and indirectly affecting their health? Gifting mass-produced, plastic swag to our communities seems like a thoughtless practice in which we jump on the bandwagon of providing prizes and favors for a generation who received them at every birthday party they attend? I’d rather give each kid a $10; in the end it is cheaper.

As a library worker, how do I feel when my efforts and contributions are rewarded with cheap trinkets (aka symbolic intervention)? Gone are the days when companies gave cash bonuses, gifts of quality, or fancy, multi-jewel-operated watches? Lapel pins seem gendered or role-bound and most likely worn by people sporting suits. Front-line workers rarely wear suits.

Do library workers trust companies when efforts at rewarding us fall short?

There’s trend of organizations using swag to recognize employees and increase morale. For the most part, the google results reflect content created by the swag industry propping up these practices and pushing organizations toward solving all their symbolic intervention problems via spending and consumerism.

Also, if our guiding documents, like mission, vision, and goals specifically cite sustainability, and we give out plastic swag, that creates a cognitive dissonance, that the library talks the talk, but doesn’t walk the walk… so if they’re being duplicitous or untruthful about one thing, can we trust them, ever?

Speaking for myself, I prefer a personal note, and a HBR article supports my choice of “symbolic interventions”:

“To make sure your symbolic interventions are well-received, it is important to pay attention to the details. For example, in our studies, the letters of appreciation were signed in ink by a direct manager and mailed to employees’ homes. A blanket email would no doubt have been much less effective.”²

Also, how far can we trust an organization lacking long-term thinking? Plastic is a short-term convenience. I know, I’m probably sounding “shrill.”

Empowerment, voice, & choice: let me choose my own gift. Don’t force something meaningless on me. This reminds me of when servers at restaurants “help” me by placing a straw in my glass. They assume everyone needs a straw. I get you’re being hospitable, but it’s my choice to use a straw or not. Yes, there are many disabled people who require straws, and I’m happy they have them to assist their consumption.

Cultural issues: Environmental racism. All the trash-bound swag ends up in landfills situated in areas mostly adjacent to where BIPOC people live. Or poor people, who are typically BIPOC. In my city, the landfill site is on the southeast side of town, which is poor.

Mostly, I just think that giving people crap is thoughtless and meaningless.

It is performative, lacks integrity and authenticity.

It seems that some libraries are interested in being intentional, like with planning and assessment, policies and procedures. Shouldn’t libraries go the extra mile to be intentional about swag? Have a statement like:

Our library intentionally reduces our impact on the environment by not giving students swag: plastic bags, wrappers, & packaging, single-use pens, and other trash-generating items.

Sure, it could be economically-driven. With rising inflation costs and diminishing library budgets, why waste money on things people throw in the trash?

And look, here’s a sustainable swag self-evaluation for library workers.

But, there’s also a cost to buying “environmentally friendly” items. Like one beverage container to rule them all.

I love tote bags, but I own twenty or more, and when you consider how dirty manufacturing them is? Ugh. I’m part of the problem. According to a 2018 study, I’d have to use my ONE organic cotton toes bag 20,000 times to “offset its overall impact of production.”³

It seems like we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. With that in mind, feeling powerless is inevitable.

However, it’s not up to one person to make a difference. This is a lie we’re taught. Collective action is necessary for changes addressing systemic issues like environmental racism.

1. I’m most comfy calling people who use libraries, patrons. Users is pejorative. Customers is yucky. However, I don’t like the assumed power differential that patron, like “patron of the arts,” implies… that their funding of libraries entitles them with power over library workers. ↩︎
2. https://hbr.org/2021/03/research-a-little-recognition-can-provide-a-big-morale-boost ↩︎
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climate-crisis.html ↩︎

Understandably, there’s resistance to coloring everyone with the same trauma brush. It’s likely that many people don’t intentionally embody the victim identity, or acknowledge it, either. So they don’t want to be treated “as if.” “As if they’re lifelong victims. Viewing everyone as victims, especially if they’re an historically marginalized person, is paternalistic.

In spite of that, my feeling is that once we realize everyone experiences some level of trauma, that we all suffer, that commonality creates a bridge between “us” and “them” or “us” and “the other” who are always easy to dismiss or oppress or insert any word here that works.

We have a bridge and that bridge builds empathy and when we operate from a place of empathy and kindness and if not real, but simulated “understanding”, that change in intention and change in approach/philosophy in US is felt by those with whom we interact, support, etc. It is authentic. We connect with others in genuine ways, not in prescribed transactional modes inflected with our emotional labor.

This week I’ve pondered about generational/historical trauma. Mostly when I think about it, I consider the effects of colonization on Indigenous people, the effects of enslavement on the enslaved, and the effects of war, genocide, violence upon those most dispossessed by those events. Or the trauma of being an 18th century seaman on The Wager, or exploring the North American continent as part of the Corps of Discovery Expedition.

For the most part, I consider trauma in the present sense, like how 9/11 affected everyone, how the COVID pandemic affected everyone, and how the continued, systemic lynching of Black people affected everyone.

But historically, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, my every-present fear was of nuclear war. My child has ever-present fear of gunmen coming into their school and shooting/killing everyone.

Each generation has their own collective trauma to bear. As a parent though, I, too feel the fear and unease everyday that my child enters the public school building.

This week I’m reading Ninth Street Women, about abstract expressionist artists working in mid-century United States. Mary Gabriel peppers her prose with trauma. I’m so far away/apart from both the Silent generation and the Greatest generation (which my sets of grandparents belonged to, and which the book deals with), that my knowledge of their generational trauma was nil.

By reading about art I’ve discovered amazing contextual information about mid twentieth century that I never knew. World War 1 and the Great Depression and World War 2 and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the years of terror during the McCarthy years all affected those generations. I don’t think they spoke about how those events affected them. Perhaps they wrote about them. They definitely painted through their trauma. And they sure as heck drank their fears and anxiety away.

Gaining the historical knowledge that trauma and how it’s expressed and felt in our culture/society is constant, but the source changes, makes me feel some kind of way. I’m struggling to pinpoint what that feeling is, though. Definitely more empathetic towards earlier generations for whom I feel great ambivalence because their legacies we inherited are so fraught.

Another somewhat allied belief that cropped up in my mind is that we all feel like we’re living in the end times, the last days. That the world has gone to shit and we’re fucked. Those bombs in Japan affected generations of people globally. The threat of nuclear war, climate change, and other situations haunt us; we cannot escape them. My evangelical upbringing informed the majority of my “end of days” childhood mentality. So this dynamic is part of my identity whether I claim it or not.