3360 Librarians and Nurses, peas in a pod?

The American Library Association has great difficulty minding the store--er--the library. Is it too boring figuring out why Google and Amazon left them in the dust? The ALA spends its time fretting over the Bush administration, poverty, crime, gay and women's rights and war while handing Castro and Chavez a library get-out-of-jail-free card. I guess all the library problems have been solved (except how to get an increasingly non-reading public to use libraries).

Then I was looking something up in a nursing journal, "Journal of Professional Nursing." I think it was something about handwashing and how hospitals and medical staff are infecting people because they've become careless. And I came across this challenge--nurses should prevent war, not just treat war wounded.

"Nurses have a distinguished history of caring for the wounded during wartime without regard to ethnicity, nationality, religion, and other personal factors. Although it is important that this tradition continue, nurses can individually and collectively take a more active posture in preventing war and armed conflict. "Journal of Professional Nursing," Nov-Dec 2006. Now what direction do you suppose that "active posture" will take?

Here's a radical concept. How about if the librarians collect, preserve, promote and dispense information (from all view points, not just their own), and nurses protect and care for our health with the highest proven standards (like hand washing). Then after doing a highly professional job for 8 hours or a shift, they could leave work with a clear conscience to tackle those projects of their own religious and political persuasion.