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108 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 OP 12 Jan \ parent \ on: Libraries are a little sad nowadays alter_native
Wow! That's quite the story.
I do remember talking to a lady on a bus, in a west coast liberal city - this is maybe 2 decades ago. She mentioned that she worked at the downtown library.
I had actually been to that library, and was surprised (this is back when homelessness was confined mostly to downtowns) that a substantial percentage of the patrons were the homeless, and honestly, it just smelled awful.
I mentioned this to the library worker, and WOW the floodgates opened up. She talked about how terrible the whole homeless problem was, and how restricted they were, in terms of what they could do. This was before it had really gained a lot of attention.
Really, nobody normal is going to go there just to browse if it's like that. Or if it feels dangerous.
Yeah, it's the standard thing of social problems propagating to weird places when they're not addressed at the source.
Not that it's clear to me how they could be addressed definitively, but using libraries (and hospitals) to sop up the dregs of wasted lives is not the answer, and will only be the end of libraries (and, eventually, hospitals).
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