Half a lifetime ago, every year a friend who was living pay check-to-pay check would still donate [1] to the library. She’d say “Libraries will do you more good in times of no money than money will in times of no libraries.” I thought she was being lovely, but maybe a bit dramatic. Libraries weren’t going away. Were they?
This timeline is hard, sometimes.
[1] the donation amount might’ve looked small to others, but was significant to her. You know that kind of money.
You want angry, militant librarians? This is how you get angry, militant librarians.
Maybe it’s time for the local Friends of the Library to step up their game until the local politicians get their heads out of their okoles.
Um…Did you even read the user name the person you just replied to?!?
If Welcome to Night Vale has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t want to let the Librarians out of the library…
A major plank of the Maga party is always “let’s burn shit down”.
Major? Do they have anything else?
“Punch down”
“All hail the Maga king”
“We never met a right wing dictator we didn’t like”
“Windmills cause cancer”
They should just do what Huntsville, TX did. Rather then closing the library just sale it and contract it out to a private company that can ban any books the city or county ask it to and nobody can stop them as the library is now privately owned and operated. I amnnot saying I am for this move, just that it is a better solution the completely closing the library. This way the county can tell the people they have runing it now to do whatever they want with no public input or protest that they cant ignore because texhnicly it wasnt their choice, it was the choice of a privately owned company which is free to do whatever they want.
“Moms for Liberty” has been the driving force behind many of these book bans-- it’s why they always focus on the same books-- and they’ve probably been active in Llano.
Privatization of our public resources is part of how we got into this mess in the first place…
And besides, we already have privatized libraries… they’re called “book stores”…
FYI…
IIRC Southern towns avoided desegregating their swimming pools by closing them or privatising them. The private pools became private clubs with membership fees that Black people could not afford. Similarly, private Christian schools mushroomed because they offered racist parents an alibi for not wanting their children to go to desegregated schools. The possibilities for backdoor segregation are one of the reasons why neoliberalism became popular in the US.
As for your proposal, even “conservative” judges might reject the legal fiction that the city was not banning books when it asked a private library to remove books.
This wouldn’t really work. This would be the County contracting out a public services and as such the government still couldn’t tell the private company to ban or not buy a book, and the private company would be bound by the same laws and regulations binding the County.
As @GagHalfrunt mentions, even (intellectually honest) conservative judges wouldn’t accept this.
looks like they made the brave tm decision to table the discussion
Following public comments both for and against a possible shutdown, the Llano County Commissioners Court decided to remove consideration of a possible closure from the agenda, assuring its three libraries remain open.
“We will try this in the courts, not through social media or through news media,” said Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham, who presides over the commissioners court and is one of the defendants in a lawsuit filed a year ago by library patrons.
translation: nobody wants this, but we think we can force it on them anyway
Have they banned that one yet?
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