Knowledge is a Right
Knowledge is a Right August 10, 2026 In the center of Berlin, set among the cobblestones of a public square, there is a pane of glass. Look down and you see an underground chamber lined with white shelves. They are empty. There is space for twenty thousand books, but not one volume stands there. The Bibliothek, or Empty Library Memorial, marks what happened here on the night of May 10, 1933. Members of the German Student Union gathered to feed more than twenty thousand books into a bonfire. These were texts written by Jewish, socialist, and liberal writers whose ideas the new government had deemed “un-German.” The burning was not spontaneous. It was planned and announced weeks in advance. University students and professors carried it out. A book burning is a claim about knowledge: that a society may decide what its people are allowed to know. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 out of the wreckage those flames foreshadowed, makes the opposite argument. Knowledge is a right, not a permission. Article 19 protects freedom of expression, and it is careful to say the freedom runs both ways. You may share your ideas, and you may seek out and receive the ideas of others — through any medium, across any border. The right to read is the receiving half of free speech. Article 26 turns to education and asks more of it than a diploma or a trade. Education, the Declaration states, should develop the whole person and teach us to understand people unlike ourselves. Put the two articles together, and you have a portrait of the citizen that self-government depends on: a person who can inform herself, consider different perspectives, and reason her way to her own judgment. A book ban removes more than a book. It shrinks the reader. The bans almost always arrive in the language of protection. But when the American Library Association tallied the book challenges recorded across the country in 2025, it found that 92 percent came from pressure groups and government officials. Fewer than 3 percent came from an individual parent. A rule that sorts books by who wrote them, or by who lives inside their pages, is doing something other than shielding children. It is deciding whose history gets taught, and whose family a person is allowed to find on a shelf. Deciding what may be read becomes deciding who may be known. A people cannot govern itself well on a record that someone else has trimmed. Back in the Berlin square, the burning began with books, not bodies. Removing the record made the rest easier; it is hard to stand up for people you were never allowed to read about. The fire was only the loudest way to decide what a society is permitted to know. That decision does not require fire. It can be made quietly, in daylight, on paper. A complaint form does slowly what a bonfire does in a night. This month, classrooms across the country fill again. Close to fifty million children attend our nation’s public schools, and the shelves waiting for many of them hold fewer books than they did a year ago. In the 2024–25 school year, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of books pulled from public school libraries and classrooms — more than 3,700 separate titles among them. The books removed most often were written by authors of color, by women, and by LGBTQ writers. The sharpest jump was in nonfiction, banned at roughly twice the previous year’s rate. The history and biography students reach for to understand the world are among the first to go. Idaho shows what those numbers look like with the force of law behind them. A 2024 law requires any library to move material deemed harmful to minors into an adults-only section within sixty days of a written complaint, or face a lawsuit. Because the law treats any depiction of homosexuality as potentially harmful, it reaches many of the books and writers already disappearing from shelves elsewhere. The law has fallen hardest on the smallest libraries. The Donnelly Public Library is a single room of about a thousand square feet. It had nowhere to put an adults-only section, so when the law took effect in the summer of 2024, the entire library had to become adults only. Children can no longer walk in without a parent beside them. Within months, circulation fell by nearly half. In Eagle, the library relocated close to two dozen titles. And across the state, librarians who cannot tell where the line falls have started to guess — pulling a book back from a child’s reach rather than risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit. None of this looks like a fire. It looks like a biography a curious kid never finds. A history a family never reads at the kitchen table. A lonely teenager who never meets someone like themselves on the page. It is a shelf getting a little emptier, one complaint at a time. A shelf emptied one complaint at a time can also be filled one book at a time. In Idaho, a group of students, parents, and a public school librarian is challenging the law in court. Neighbors keep writing letters, sitting through board meetings, asking for titles to be put back. This is a community deciding for itself what it will know. The pane of glass in Berlin was set into the square in 1995, decades after the fire, by people who chose to keep the emptiness visible rather than pave it over. Those shelves are sealed now. They will never hold another book. Our shelves are not under glass. Not yet. They are still open, still in reach, still ours to fill.
More than a Moment
Caring for other people is less a single moment than a way of being with them over time. It is less a decision made once than a practice returned to. That steady practice is what human rights work is mostly made of.
Take a Seat
One of the most consequential things Frank Church ever did, he did sitting down. He took a seat at the head of a committee table and started asking questions. The answers became laws, and the laws became working equipment: a committee that still meets, departments that still review, auditors who still report past their agency heads to Congress. So we remember Frank Church with a table.
The year he was not supposed to survive taught him to take every chance. Sitting down at that table was one of them. He asked his questions at a moment when two of every three Americans had concluded the answers would not matter. He asked anyway.
There are tables everywhere. A city council chamber. A school board meeting. The office where a records request gets filed. Most of them have chairs that nobody sits in. Take a seat.
In Our Name
In Our Name July 20, 2026 This spring, the state finished a renovation at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise. The project took the better part of a year and cost more than $1.2 million. It is a retrofitted unit in F-Block, rebuilt for the firing squad — because on July 1, Idaho became the first state in America to make that method its primary means of execution. Four other states permit it, but only as an option. Idaho alone has made it the default. Blueprints. Contractors. Change orders. Someone chose the lighting and measured the sight lines. The Department of Correction wrote detailed training requirements and operational guidelines. Nothing about a room like this is accidental; every part of what will happen inside it was decided long before anyone arrives. The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was made this way too. Before the first visitor walked its pathways, someone chose which voices to engrave. Someone decided to etch the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in stone. The Memorial and F-Block stand only miles apart, built by the same community. Each is a set of decisions about the value of a human life. The room in F-Block would be easier to accept if it were built for monsters. But eight human beings sit on Idaho’s death row, all convicted of murder — crimes that stole lives, shattered families, left grief that nothing should soften. Human dignity, though, is not a reward for good behavior. The Universal Declaration defines it as something every person is born with — not earned, and so not something a court can take away. That is the hard part. Dignity for the people we love asks little of us. Dignity for the condemned asks everything. It asks what it means that the newest room our state has built is designed for three rifles and a target placed over a human heart. The room exists partly because of a February morning in 2024, when Idaho attempted its first execution in nearly twelve years. The prisoner was Thomas Creech, the longest-serving man on the state’s death row. The execution team tried to establish an IV line for lethal injection. They tried eight times. They could not. The state halted the execution and returned Creech to his cell. Lawmakers concluded the method was unreliable. The sponsors of House Bill 37 called the firing squad quick and certain. The bill passed the Senate 28 to 7 and the House 58 to 11, and Governor Little signed it into law. But certainty is a claim, not a fact. On the floor of the Idaho Senate, one legislator — a veteran and retired police officer — cautioned his colleagues that death by firing squad is sometimes instantaneous and sometimes not. He suggested that anyone who had seen what he had seen would vote differently. Since executions resumed in the United States in 1977, only six have been carried out by firing squad, two of which went badly. What happens in F-Block will be done in our name. The firing squad will be staffed by our neighbors, funded by our money. This will all be done on behalf of every Idahoan. Whatever one believes about the death penalty itself, the method now belongs to all of us. So does the obligation to witness it honestly, without looking away. The Universal Declaration, the one etched in stone at the Memorial, was written in 1948 by people who had just seen what happens when a state decides some lives count and some do not. Their answer was to make a strong claim about the dignity of every human life — and they carved out no exceptions. Not for the guilty. Not for anyone. They understood that dignity is not a verdict we render on one another. It is the ground beneath all of us — or it is beneath none of us. The room in F-Block is ready. The lighting is chosen, the sight lines are measured, the officers are trained. Everything about it is decided except what it says about who we are. That question is still under construction.
Nothing on the Scoreboard Moved
The record of that match between Cabo Verde and Spain will always show ninety minutes without a goal. It is an honest record that misses everything. Seven times the ball came flying at Vozinha, and seven times he rose to meet it. Each time strangers around the world rose with him. Nothing on the scoreboard moved. Everything else did.
Carry the Song
Carry the Song July 6, 2026 Morning sun streams through the windows of the Wassmuth Center as the children arrive for the first day of Kindness Camp. Some cling to their caregivers; others drift toward the books and the art supplies waiting on the tables. They have all come to spend the week exploring one idea: kindness. Soon they gather in a circle, clapping out the rhythm of the welcome song and greeting each other by name. They lose the words, laugh, and start over. The sound rises, young voices feeling their way to the end of a verse — and finding it, together. It would be easy to just call this a pleasant way to spend a summer week — somewhere to put children while the serious business of the world goes on elsewhere. But a child learning a song is also learning that her voice carries, that others will catch it when she falters, that she has something worth saying. Later that morning, she will lift a paintbrush and set down her own vision of what kindness looks like. And later still she will add her piece to the wall — a paper leaf, a bright flower, a piece of the sun — until the separate small efforts become one forest the whole group has created together. This is where justice begins: in a room where a child learns her voice will be caught, and that her small part joins something larger than herself. Children grasp this sooner than we expect. In Birmingham in 1963, the campaign against segregation had stalled. Adults who marched risked losing their jobs. So the movement turned to the city’s children, and they showed up. Thousands walking out of school, singing. The city met them with fire hoses and police dogs. The photographs traveled the world, and within weeks President Kennedy went on television to call segregation a moral wrong the nation could no longer ignore — a turn that led, the next summer, to the Civil Rights Act. Young people continue to step into public life. A few years ago, just across the Idaho border, sixteen young Montanans sued their state over its role in the warming climate. They did not speak in the abstract: they testified to the wildfire smoke that kept them indoors, the snow that came late or not at all. The courts agreed that their right to a clean and healthful environment had been violated — the first climate case of its kind in the country to reach trial, and they won it. They spoke, and the courts listened. But no one walks into a courtroom naturally assured her voice counts; that confidence can be developed early, in far smaller settings — places like this one. Kindness Camp asks the youngest of them to practice being kind: to themselves, to one another, to the earth. They learn that each person carries an invisible space that is theirs alone, and that kindness can mean asking before you cross into someone else’s. By the last day you hear it from the children directly: “I need a little space,” or “That’s too loud for me. Could you use a quiet voice?” Each of those small sentences is a child discovering she has a say: that she can name what she needs and be answered, that the world is partly hers to shape. It is among the first rights anyone practices: the right to one’s own self. Those early lessons about honoring another person’s dignity eventually become something larger: the same moral ground the Birmingham students marched onto and the Montana plaintiffs stood upon. What children need from us is not protection from the hard questions but company inside them. A child notices early who is left out and what is unfair, and says so plainly, before anyone has taught her to look away. The instinct is to smooth it over, to tell her the world is gentler than it is. The truer thing is to stay in the question with her — to walk beside her rather than out front, to treat a five-year-old’s sense of fairness as the real thing it is. But none of this needs to be solemn. Joy is not the opposite of those questions; it is what gives the child the nerve to keep asking them. So we collect joy on purpose — the wrong note that gets more delightful each time it comes around, the freeze dance that dissolves into giggles the instant the music cuts out, the flower that runs in the wet paint and turns into something nobody planned. She learns as much from these as from anything graver: that a room can hold her mistakes, that she can begin again, that she is cared for even when she gets it wrong. A child who has felt how good it is to belong will spend a lifetime building that feeling for others. On the last morning of camp, the children sing the welcome song all the way through. Their words are steadier now, and when one voice wavers the others carry it. Behind them on the wall, the forest they made is complete. The children will take the song with them — they will leave the forest for whoever comes next.
Do the Unheard-of Thing
More than a century ago, Rebecca Brown Mitchell lit a candle in a bottle on a dirt floor. The light is still on, in rooms across Idaho and throughout the country, kept burning by each person who decides to act. Rebecca made her corner of the country better, one unheard-of thing at a time. So can you. Mark this milestone in our nation’s story: find the thing no one around you has done yet, and do it. Then leave the light on for those who will come next.
The Ground in Front of You
The Ground in Front of You June 22, 2026 In Siem Reap, every one of our Idaho students held a rat in both hands — bigger and gentler than expected, and the reason a stretch of Cambodian land is safe to walk across today. These rats are trained to smell the explosive inside a buried landmine. Light enough to walk over a mine without setting it off, a rat is able to find what is hidden, mark it, and trot off for a treat — and a patch of the earth is safe to live on again. Cleared ground becomes a field to farm, a path to a well, a road a child can take to school. Decades of war left hundreds of thousands of landmines in Cambodia’s soil, and clearing them happens slowly — meter by careful meter, by people and rats who give years to the patch in front of them. Since 2014, the APOPO humanitarian organization and its Cambodian partners have cleared more than 33 million square meters this way. The reward isn’t simply the danger removed. It is everything that can grow once the ground is safe. That slow return — danger cleared, life growing back — is what our H-RISE youth leaders crossed the world to understand. They saw how human rights are stripped away, and how they are built back. Their trip was the culmination of a year spent studying human rights and Cambodian history. The landmines were never really the subject. They were how something larger came into focus: dignity itself. Every person is born with equal dignity and rights. This is the founding promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But being born with a right is not the same as being able to live it. A child has every right to an education; a minefield between her home and her school can still keep her from it. The dignity is already hers. The conditions to live it are what people have to build — and learning to do that is what we came for. In Cambodia, we learned beside the people doing the work. We followed their lead, lent our hands, and listened to the survivors who are rebuilding their communities. In Kampot, we waded into the coastal mud to plant mangroves, fragile slips of green that take years to root and will one day shelter a whole shoreline and the village behind it. We visited a pepper farm where the vines bear nothing for years and then give for decades; at a silk farm outside of Siem Reap, a single thread unwound from one cocoon. None of it is fast. All of it begins small. And all of it lasts only because someone chose to nurture it and to stay. At three schools in the Svay Leu District, we traded mud for metal. One hundred and fifty bicycles stood in rows, kickstands down, waiting for their riders. We tightened bolts, fixed baskets to the handlebars, and played with the kids before they hopped on their new bikes and wobbled down the road. Now they can safely reach a classroom that used to be too far to walk. A bicycle is a simple thing. It is also a child’s education made suddenly possible, joy and opportunity rolling down the same road. The teachers told us plainly about that distance and the other obstacles between a student and a full day of learning. Their hopes are much like ours at home. You can read in an American textbook that all people are born equal in dignity and rights. You understand it differently with mud on your hands. Sometimes you have to leave home to see your own community clearly — and to understand that a Cambodian child’s dignity is bound up with your own, that none of it stops at a border. Now the H-RISE youth leaders are home, where the lessons have to prove themselves. They did not come back with the whole world figured out. They came back with something smaller and more useful: the knowledge that repair is ordinary work, and that it starts with people who decide to begin. What they learned among the landmines and the mangroves applies to their own streets. The barriers to dignity in Idaho are not buried in the ground. They show up in a classroom where a student doesn’t feel safe, a workplace that treats someone as less than equal, a state’s policies that leave people out. But we can overcome them with the same steady, shared effort. This summer, these young people are getting started, turning what they saw into initiatives of their own. They are not waiting to be older, or for someone with more authority to go first. They are beginning with the ground in front of them. The rats never see the whole minefield. Each one knows its own patch, clears it, and leaves the ground ready for whatever comes next — a crop, a footpath, a child on a bicycle. You tend the patch in front of you. You plant what will outlast you. You do it beside others. And somewhere, a child pushes off, finds her balance, and rides.
What We’re Building Together
In 1995, nearly 50,000 people stepped into Anne Frank’s story when a traveling exhibit arrived in Boise. It was a charged, uncertain time. The Aryan Nations was active in North Idaho, where Bill Wassmuth and other community leaders had spent years building a coalition to confront white supremacist ideology with steady, public resistance. The same currents were pressing further south, where the campaign for Proposition 1 was spreading anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and the local NAACP leader had a rock thrown through the front window of her home. The message was clear: who belonged — and who did not — was up for debate.
But that is not the only story that was unfolding.
Notice, Name, and Build
Notice, Name, and Build June 8, 2026 Bobby Gaytan’s mother worked the fields. While most children were expected to stay there with their parents, Maria Luisa Gaytan insisted that her six children always be enrolled in school. She did not stop at her own family. Maria Luisa passed out college applications, helped families fill out their income tax forms, interpreted, and navigated systems that most people found impenetrable. There were often long lines at her door of people seeking her aid. She kept at it. Maria Luisa went on to earn a GED and a teaching certificate in college and worked as a liaison for migrant families in her school district. Her kitchen table was a command center for change. The building where the Wassmuth Center does its work is named for another Idahoan who understood farm labor: Governor Philip E. Batt, a former onion farmer who advanced fair wages and safer working conditions for farm laborers. He also founded the Idaho Human Rights Commission. Maria Luisa and Governor Batt never worked side by side, but they were working toward the same goal. One through grassroots aid. The other through institutional authority. Both through the power they had. After his mother died, Bobby began seeing butterflies everywhere. Travelers. Carriers of beauty. And then he did something with that. His mother’s work — the kitchen table, the tax forms, the college applications, the long lines at the door — could have disappeared. Most unglamorous work does. But Bobby noticed what his mother had built. And he named it — in color, in light, in a painting that now hangs in a building dedicated to human rights. At the Wassmuth Center, we call this practice Notice and Name Bright Spots. It is the discipline of paying close enough attention to your community that you can see where the world you want is already being built. It requires looking past what is broken — not to ignore it, but to identify what is working. That discipline matters right now. It is June in Idaho, and there is plenty to worry about. The 2026 legislative session brought bills targeting immigrant communities, trans Idahoans, and the basic question of who belongs here. It would be easy — and not inaccurate — to call this a hard time for human rights. But what you pay attention to determines what you can build. During this session, while harmful bills moved through committee after committee, over a thousand Idahoans contacted their lawmakers. Faith leaders showed up at the statehouse in solidarity with immigrant and trans neighbors. And SB 1293 passed, restoring access to crime victim services for undocumented Idahoans. For years, that access had been blocked. People who experienced domestic violence or assault could be denied help because of their immigration status. This bill’s passage didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people had been doing the work for years: building relationships, showing up to testify, making the case that everyone in Idaho deserves safety. If you only watched for what went wrong this session, you would miss it. Every community has bright spots. Most go unnamed, which means they cannot be learned from and they cannot grow. Maria Luisa Gaytan’s work at her kitchen table could have been one of them. But her son saw it, and named it, and now she stands on the wall of a human rights center in Boise — in a wide straw hat and work gloves, a hoe in her hands, monarch butterflies lifting off around her, smiling.