Ellie Black, the Snow Hill fourth grader whose Little Library project at Byrd Park has been vandalized repeatedly, is learning a valuable lesson: some people take pride in being mean and stupid.
Ellies’s Little Library is a small outdoors installation that holds a few books that anyone can borrow and return. It’s a kind and gentle effort to provide for those who wish to read and learn, but don’t have the opportunity. Obviously, not everyone appreciates the value of those pursuits.
Sometimes they grow out of it — this assumes the vandals are relatively young — and sometimes they go on to become regular contributors to the comments sections on social media, where they continue to be idiots anonymously and revel in the response.
It’s apparently a perverse attempt to involve themselves in society, because being limited by either the absence of intelligence or the desire to improve whatever degree of that they do have, they resort to outrageous behavior to have any sort of effect, however negative that might be.
It’s a pretty lonely existence when you have to be your own hero, or anti-hero, because no one else is paying attention.
Ellie, however, is a step ahead of most people, young or old, because she has vowed to respond in the only way that makes sense for her library and life in general: shrug off the meanness and continue to make repairs as needed.