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Help me tell the story of how we got to this point where we're pushing as hard as we can to #closethelibraries, after years of being told & funded like we're the furthest thing from a non-essential service. Tell me how social infrastructure collapsed to the point where we're it.
(I have answers but I want to hear yours)
Okay, was it the typo? Anyway, I'll go. I think most of us read Palaces for the People, right? @EricKlinenberg theorizes in the part about libraries that ppl with the power to fund them have bought into the notion that all information & culture is online & view them as a luxury.
I can say that in my exp at a public library, we often found that many at the town admin level never came to the library and would do little annoying things like return books to us via interoffice mail even though town hall was literally next door. So they never saw our reality.
In the book, Klinenberg also notes that patrons may feel that libraries are a given, that they are permanent default fixtures in their town. So that might explain part of why it's tough to mobilize them as advocates, since they see the library as enduring, come what may.
This creates 2 different forms of invisibility, above & below, that work to the advantage of municipalities where officials know the rest of social infrastructure has collapsed or been underfunded for years. Combine this with, as needed, the martyrdom & do-more-with-less culture
or framing assertive directors or union reps in a female-dominated profession as crazy bitches--something we've also seen targeted at any staff member who stands up for their health & safety during the current crisis--and that's one chunk of how you get to where we are now.
The other chunk is the lack of investment in the rest of social infrastructure, leaving the library in many communities as the last thing standing. At my last job I visited Section 8 apartments to do tech classes. These buildings either had no computers or they were 10 years old.
In Boston, every shelter is at capacity or over every night. There's at least 10 pieces of legislation stuck in the MA state house right now to try to push back vs effects of the fact that you need to make at least $30/hour to live here. And there's empty luxury condos all over.
Where else do people have not only free access to the internet but also free people around to help them use tech? Even if "everything's online," at least a quarter of the population has no way of accessing it on their own. You would hope that an upshot of the recent scramble to
shift education online would expose that reality more clearly than ever, but we're yet to see what the lasting consequences of the present moment will be. Not only are libraries acting as shelters & bridging digital divides--they're sites for childcare & early childhood education
and act as hubs for immigrant communities who can take ELL courses, join conversation circles, prepare for citizenship. And not only that, they provide companionship & community through book clubs, movie nights, and crafting programs. Of course it hurts when libraries are closed.
But more to the point, when libraries close, it becomes readily apparent how unprepared our cities & towns are to support and protect our most vulnerable neighbors during a crisis like this. It's a shock to realize how much is lost when we lock our doors.
The folks insisting on curbside pickup right now are not only unnecessarily endangering their staff; they're reducing the value, importance, and existence of all of that, and prioritizing a subset of the patronage that definitely isn't the one that needs us the most.
Curbside has become the perfect analogy of all that's wrong: 1) It's self-sacrificial. 2) It benefits a privileged subset of patrons. 3) It doesn't tell the story of all we do. 4) Just like the nerve-grating dinosaur costumes in the library parking lot, it covers up the problem.
We have to start thinking right now of how we get ourselves out of this corner. How do we mobilize our patrons for better advocacy? How do we show what we do even if the people in charge of the budget don't ever come in to see it? How do we build alliances with like-minded orgs?
The fight to close and protect people has been bad enough. The fight to get what we need to help our communities get back on track--which we *will* be doing, when things are back to "normal"--is going to be much harder.
