[Libs-Or] Problems for Corvallis-Benton County Library With youth at entrance--coming soon to a library near you?

[Hope Leman]

Hi, everyone. I have been hanging back a bit waiting to see what some of the reaction was to be to the situation with the entrance to the Corvallis-Benton Public Library matter and now I just want to thank everyone who responded.

I agree wholeheartedly with the comments of Bob Jones when he says, “Does the library have an obligation to tolerate daylong use as a hangout by persons who are not availing themselves of actual library services?”

I must admit that I have been somewhat reluctant to speak out on the matter because as soon as one expresses concern about loitering and the supposed “homeless” (many of whom are homeless simply because they have exhausted the patience of every living member of their family and alienated everyone who has attempted to befriend them) she can be tarred as callous and heartless.

But, again, I agree with Bob Jones. A library is meant to function as a library. To me, what the librarians who took the side of the loiterers mentioned in the new story are missing are the comments of the young father who has simply given up going to the Corvallis branch and now takes his six-year-old to the Philomath branch, even though it has fewer books and other resources for his child to benefit from. What about his rights and those of his child? When libraries start to cater only to the dysfunctional they themselves becomes dysfunctional in that they lose sight of their mission, which is to serve as places of learning and refuge for those who seek knowledge. And many of those people are poor.

Also, if we are genuinely interested in helping the young people who are hanging out on the front steps of the library while going into the library solely to use the restroom, how we are helping them when we make it easier for them to become ever more shiftless? Well-intentioned psychobabble about their rough backgrounds only tars them in the eyes of others as incorrigible messes incapable of acquiring good manners, gainful employment and the means to make it in the workplace or to avail themselves of the blessings of culture and education. How are we helping them by facilitating perpetual boorishness and condemning the library to increasing levels of irrelevance to those who still treasure what libraries once stood for, which among other things was their reputation as places where poor people could gain access to the blessings of books and the kindness of librarians and the firmness of librarians who were not afraid to enforce elementary standards of behavior that helped generations of Americans work their way out of poverty and into a life of their mind?

I feel so strongly on this topic because I was born in Corvallis and one of my earliest memories is going with my mother and slightly older sister to the children’s room of the library here. We did not have to run a gauntlet and our mother did not have to give up on taking us there. And we all have seen that public libraries are in trouble and they are in trouble partially because they are choosing to cater to those who want to hang out just outside their doors and not to those who want to enter the premises. There is a world of difference between the young video gamer who might benefit from a gaming night at the public library and a 24-year-old loafer (and yes, I  will use such a word for such things do exist) who likes to bully young mothers and small children.

I spend huge amounts of time on grant-related matters and I could only roll my eyes that one of the proposed solutions to the problems at the hooligans (yes, there are those things too—along with the genuinely mentally ill or those unemployed and desperately looking for work) is to try to find grant money for yet another program to deal with the problem. There is a plethora of programs designed to help the down and out and Corvallis and the kids at the library are free to avail themselves of them. Do we really need to set up yet another to compete for the small amount of funding that they all already have to compete for?

I voted dutifully for the latest levy for our public library just a few weeks ago. But I voted for it because it was intended for fund a library. Next time will voters be so quick to support a library they may have by then come to regard as an expensive institution that puts political correctness above public service and which they no longer visit?

Let us face reality and not sacrifice the working poor on the alter of the rebel without a cause who just wants to hang out.

Hope Leman

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