Ignorance is destroying our libraries, the people that think they can steal the whole book, CD or tape don't understand the worth as part of a shared collection. I have been weeding the collection at McNeil Island's library of all the books that are missing pictures, pages and sometimes whole chapters. To the one individual that took something away from us all - a curse on your efforts for evil - not that I am a cursor. I don't need to be - in your little world things are stol
en from you, you live in fear of being found out. You know the reason you want those pictures of scantily clad elves is because you are attracted to desires for the bodies of children - that is an ugly thing and most of the other inmates will do bloody things to you if they find out. No, you don't need to be cursed for your life is dark, the hidden pictures of beautiful cars, women and motorcycles that you think give you power are just waiting for the corrections officers to find or for you to toss out when the fear finds you again. I know that you won't stop messing up your library, stealing from it and ruining it - not until you grow up and learn to value things you haven't had to pay for, that don't cost you anything directly, until you grow up and learn to share, until you get really old and accept that others will get better people around them in life, and that you will die alone because you never became a better person. You will be back to the library that you have profaned and marred, and those wounds you left don't heal - there isn't enough money for repairing the Vandals' destruction.Another type of ignorance that destroys libraries, is budget cutting. So having worked in libraries for over fifteen years, the fears of the staff always focus a bit on the budget cycle. There are only so many dollars, and one can hire five people at thirty thousand a year and only one at one hundred and fifty thousand a year. Which is fine if the the big payroll provides more donations and bequests and improvements in how the library provides services and relevance to the community needs. Having been one of the five on budget cuts while there are always well paid leadership and management - leading and managing less every time the budget is cut - I have my opinion. Seems that I have voiced my opinion and shocked some of that leadership a bit before - but I blame that on not being well led and stress relief. Budget is exactly like diet - a word that exists to describe a process and quickly becomes associated with an uncomfortable process that hurts something in one's good life, but if you had always known and observed the process - and lived in moderation - the pain would never be there. But when one has over-reached in spending, the cut back comes and the staff is reduced, the hours shortened, the service slinks off into only a memory and an old fairy tale, until that final cut must be made - that closes the door to the library. Those doors don't ever seem to re-open, and another light in the lives of the library patrons old, new and future is extinguished.
Working a prison library, where there aren't too many lights for the most terrible population of prisoners, 1200 inmates with open time for only six hundred and sixty to have one hour a week, every week that the one Library Keeper is around to open the door five days. There are too many potential patrons that can't improve their minds, lives and futures. They will be coming one day to live with you - to become part of your community. Will they be better neighbors? Did they get a chance to learn what they hadn't before being imprisoned about working for a better life, making good choices and basic good manners? Or are you going to get the fools that still steal from library books, that don't share, that don't care and that only know how to scare?
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