Writers, arise!

[anghara]

This is APPALLING news. According to these stories, we are in dire trouble. This may be the canary in the coal mine. A few money quotes from the articles:



The 15 libraries serving this rural forest community lost $7 million
in federal funding this year -- nearly 80 percent of the system's budget.

Last fall, Congress failed to reauthorize a $400 million annual
subsidy to 41 states to help rural counties prop up their local
economies. Oregon took the biggest hit -- $150 million. Jackson
County lost $23 million and had to slash everywhere, from reducing
jail beds to cutting search and rescue teams.
That meant some hard choices, said Jackson County Administrator Danny Jordan.

"Losing libraries is a huge business deterrent -- who wants to move
to a city that doesn't have libraries?" Jordan said. "But we decided
we had to maintain public safety, which is already taking a $3.5
million cut. We won't be able to monitor misdemeanor sex offenders
anymore. The hard reality is that libraries are not an option for us."


We won't be able to monitor misdemeanour sex offenders any more. And a generation of kids who relied on library access for journeys of the imagination are going to grow up illiterate. Oh, safe, safe, to be sure - no steenkin' sex offenders in this county! - but functionally illiterate...

The closure of Jackson County's library system
represents the largest such action in the
nation's history, said Emily Sheketoff, executive
director of the Washington, D.C., office of the American Library Association.

"This is the worst that there has ever been," Sheketoff said.
an outreach program that
delivers books and other materials each month to
up to 800 blind, disabled and elderly people who
are unable to go to a local library.


The children and the elderly and the disabled should have better things to do with their time than read, I suppose. And the able-bodied who can drive can jolly well go into the next county for their..

Oh - my - GOD ...

Why hasn't there been a national outcry about this? WHY has federal funding for library services been cut? WHY is all the tax money going to fund a war we are losing in a country which is not ours and which doesn't want us there?

Is there an end to this insanity?

If you are in Oregon, write to your Congresscritters and Senators and scream, LOUDLY. If you are not in Oregon, write to those people anwyay and scream just as loudly - because YOU COULD BE NEXT.

Stop shooting people in foreign countries. Stop "monitoring misdemeanour sex offenders" - they don't need to be on 24-hour surveillance, really they don't.

Save the books.

Save the bridge to the worlds of the imagination before it crumbles away completely, and for good.

I addressed this post to the writers amongst us - but even if all you've ever been is an avid reader, this rallying cry applies to you, too. Speak out about this. Yell. Scream. Protest.

Don't let this pernicious plague spread. Please.

Comments

[preyforhuntress.livejournal.com]

That'll be our wonderful president sticking it to the Blue states who voted against him - again. Bastard! Thank the gods it's almost over.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The Democratic Party has 2007 and 2008 to blow the next election. Remember how bullet-proof GHWB looked after the first Gulf War?

[maryrobinette.livejournal.com]

I can only hope that the referenda crowd gets their act together to rally around this.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I lived in Providence, RI, and was a member of the not-really-public private NGO library system. A bit of info from their website:

Since our founding in 1875, Providence Public Library has served as the public library for the City of Providence. In addition to free, municipal services, we provide the City with innovative and effective community programs, as recognized by our receipt of the National Award for Library Service in 2001. However, our support from the City lags behind cities with comparable populations. While other cities spend an average of $43 per person, Providence allots only $17 for each city resident.

Providence's system is quite nice, if a little on the scraping-by-side, but it's the fact that the city residents are willing & able to support it, keep it going...

Well, I guess it's like this: if you know it's valuable & important, you could pay taxes to the city who then sends the $$ to the libraries. Or you could donate the $$ straight to the libraries (which, incidentally, you can do regardless of whether the library is NGO or govt-owned).

The problem is that our taxes remain the same, instead of cutting back and letting us use that extra money as our own sort of civil discretionary funding.

Monitoring minor sex offenders... please. Granted, I'm not a parent (though I doubt that'd change my opinion a great deal), but I see the whole 'monitoring' fuss as one more way for parents to shirk their duties and sluff off their neighborhood/civil responsibilities onto the city/state. "I've checked the list, and there's no predators in my neighborhood, so my kid can play as s/he likes" or even "I told my kid to avoid such-and-such a house, and everything else is fine."

I put that attitude into the same box as those morons who might wear a seatbelt, but definitely have an airbag -- and then speed recklessly.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

There's another side to this news item as well. Some people are playing up the link to reduced funds from logging-related taxes and are basically saying, "You can have your libraries back if you get those eco-freaks off our backs about logging issues ... or just let us sell large tracts of public lands directly to the timber companies."

[guinwhyte.livejournal.com]

I was trying to figure out what a "misdemeanor sex offender" was (what most people think of when they see "sex offender" is felony-type offenders), and from what I was able to figure out, that's along the lines of people picked up for soliciting prostitutes or indecent exposure. Yes, that's a problem, but so is not having access to books -- the latter has as many, if not more, ramifications than the first. (Heck, the two are occasionally related -- the 5th floor of our university library was notorious for people who exposed themselves there.)