Welcome to the February Just Posts, the parenting blogosphere's roundup of
writing on social justice issues. The Just Posts are sponsored be me and my
better half, Jen of One Plus
Two.

Each month, Jen and I kick off this linky love list by talking a bit about
social justice causes near and dear to our hearts--don't forget to pop over
and see what Jen has served
up. As for me, today I need to state with much chagrin that you are getting
a 2 for 1 special. You see, I was simply going to link to one of my
favourite web sites in the world and leave it at that. The site is called
PapaInk and until very recently it was a beautiful, not-for-profit, curated
gallery of children's art. Words cannot do justice to how wonderful this
site was/is. PapaInk featured art that was joyous, art that was skilled, and
the glorious juvenilia of artists who went on to become famous, but there
were also collections that could evoke such horror and pathos that at times
I thought my heart would break just looking at the images. You see, PapaInk
always devoted space to children's art from times and regions of intense
trauma: art from the Holocaust, from Bosnia, from 9-11 and from the Rwandan
genocide to name a few. Nothing in the West--no newspapers, no academic
tomes, no documentaries, no NOTHING--could speak more to the need for global
change than these images. Click on href="http://www.powerofculture.nl/uk/worldsite/papaink.html">this link
to see what I mean.

This morning I was all set to pop a link into this post. It was then that I
discovered that the site's server is now "Forbidden." What happened? I wish
I knew. I googled high and low to find out but there were no notices, no
press releases, and no word of mouth rumours. I visited this site just last
month; now it has simply disappeared. Maybe the site is down temporarily
(she hoped naively): a little restructuring and it will be up next week.
Maybe it has shifted to a cost-recovery licensing platform (she grasped at
straws knowing that if it had there would be a welcome mat and VISA
machine). Maybe (she thought realistically) this is just another example of
a not-for-profit going under with no money to stay and less money to plot a
feasible, long-term exit strategy.

Maybe I am just paranoid. But the thing is this. I am a librarian. I see
this kind of thing all the time. Valuable information simply disappears. Too
often such information originates as government publications or through
government funded not-for-profits. This is public information that was out
there one day that just up and disappears the next. Our tax dollars go
towards projects designed for the public interest and, suddenly, with no
warning these projects become for-fee services or they simply disappear. We
pride ourselves on living in strong democracies here in the West, and yet we
are silent witness to the erosion of so many of rights and freedoms that
democracy should entail--like a public record that is kept public.

Tonight I give thanks to the powers that be for libraries, for digital
archives, and, specifically, for the href="http://www.archive.org/index.php">Internet Archive. Without
libraries always lobbying in the interests of public information so much
would be lost, especially now that we live in a digital age. What gets
written here and published on the internet is so fleeting and so vulnerable.
But thanks to the Internet Archive this digital universe need not be as
ethereal as a dream. At the Internet Archive you will find a snapshot of href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060421164632/www.papaink.org/gallery/home/index.html">PapaInk
from a year ago. Have a look at the collection called href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060427055836/www.papaink.org/gallery/home/artist/display/165.html">Witness
to Genocide: The Children of Rwanda. Think about Darfur, the Child
Soldiers of Uganda, Iraq... Try not to cry.