This is, in fact, the hottest political controversy in the county and has been for some time.
The anonymous email claims “these individuals encourage agitation and unprofessionally mock duly appointed FRL board members and elected county commissioners. Such unethical behavior seriously undermines the Sylva Herald’s credibility and opens this newspaper up to legal ramifications and public embarrassment.”
I do not share the opinion that mocking the duly elected county commissioners in any way damages one's credibility.
“YOU MUST CEASE publication of all falsehoods, slander, and spin,” the email continues without offering an example. “The Sylva Herald must CEASE ALL COLLUSION WITH EXTREMISTS. Period. Furthermore, Dave Russell and Beth Lawrence should resign immediately. Dave Russell doesn’t even live in Jackson County and regularly disregards objective truth while concealing facts. He has also been caught red handed by his own words making threats.”
The newspapers went ahead and published a list of the alleged extremists; I am sorry to report that I didn't make the cut. One who did is Antoinette MacWatt, the widow of a local Marine Corps veteran and a supporter of staying in the existing public library system -- obviously an extremist viewpoint, having a strong opinion about a public library.
“This is your only warning. We will not respond to you,” it reads. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
All I can figure is that the Republican side -- obviously aligned with the ones sending these anonymous emails -- has decided that the controversy is working for them in the local elections, or else has figured out some way to grift off control of the very limited budget associated with a local public library. If they've managed the latter they must be quite clever, a cleverness quite masked by their chosen mode of communications.
14 comments:
Dunno. I might not give them credit for that much planning. "Unbalanced" would seem adequate to me, likely over some bewildering previous slight.
I think I can explain the slight. They really hate that librarians are left-wing -- which they are. You go into a public library in rural Georgia or NC or anywhere, the books on display are left-wing causes and celebrities. There's LGBTQ displays, Obama-loving displays, Black Lives Matter displays, and so forth. They feel like the public money is being spent running down their culture and their kind.
And it is. That's totally true.
Still and all, somebody's got to run the library. Where are you going to find a librarian who isn't a leftist? The ALA is basically communist. Nobody you hire to replace these people is both minimally qualified and also not on the left. And really, isn't the public library the least worst place for them to be?
Libraries have come up in conversation recently with my wife. We used to be ardent patrons of two, in two different counties. Now we rarely (as in, I cannot remember the last time) use them. Because they are filled with woke wisdom.
My mother volunteered in a tiny New England library for 50 years. I would come home after school with an armload of books.
She would be appalled at the state of them now.
Come on. "Qualified"? Seriously? 30 years ago maybe - or in a research library or archive- but an average county general purpose library? Anyone who can spell, type, and rub seven brain cells together should be able to run one.
As I said, it’s THE political issue of the local government, for several years running. But it’s just people feeling slighted, as AVI says; most of them just are hurt that values other than their own are displayed on the shelves and posters.
What would you rather these people do than making cardboard cutout displays? They think what they think, and can’t be changed; and who wants to round people up for re-education? Doing that would make one much worse, at only a dodgy chance of making them better. Plus somebody would have to spend their time running the things.
I can’t think of a better place for them to be than a public library. Better than a public school, certainly. Plenty of them there, too, and it’s a bigger problem.
"What would you rather these people do"
Live under a bridge in a cardboard refrigerator box comes to mind...
Years ago, I went into the main library in Bethesda MD during one of the election campaigns and noticed that all of the political books were Dem-leaning, and asked if I could talk with someone about it. Not sure who I was expecting to come out, but it wasn't the totally beautiful young woman who listened to what I had to say and said "I'll fix it"....and she did. Much more balance in the display the very next day.
Maybe we're just tired of gatekeepers altogether. Maybe also, we don't really need libraries anymore (much as I love physical books, I have to admit spending public monies on this is questionable in the era of the internet and project Gutenberg).
Grim- are they really "hurt that values other than their own are displayed on the shelves and posters", or that their values aren't presented at all? I'm old enough to remember when it was the left that proclaimed that a serious wronging of people.
First of all, I'd say get wokesters away from the control of information. As for where they could be better employed, there are a number of places, such as sanitation jobs, animal shelters, community gardens, that sort of thing.
- Tom
Many young librarians are quite earnest, and sheltered in their MLS programs from opposing viewpoints. I'm glad you found one who was open to learning.
I have spent a lot of my life in a library or two, although more often academic ones than public ones (whose value is chiefly in local history -- where they remain priceless, as those locally published newspapers and books and family records are not available elsewhere). I'd hope we could find a way to maintain them as a good public space, somewhere you can go and spend some time without having to spend any money, somewhere you can sit and relax without anyone hurrying you, even if they don't require a massive staff or budget these days.
So smaller, perhaps; more focused on what they're really good at, perhaps as well. But of all the things that we tend to use government to do, libraries are one of the better ones. It's astonishing to me to see people fighting so hotly over it.
I don't go by often enough to tell you what the percentages are, but the library definitely displays patriotic flags on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, and Christmas decorations at Christmastime. So they can't say that they're completely excluded.
In fact I think it's really the LGBTQ stuff that's the main thing driving all this. Now the library is in Sylva, where drag shows occur occasionally at one of the main street brewpubs (this being Western Carolina, there are several of these). For reasons I don't understand, the town also has a Pride parade on Labor Day in addition to Pride Month in June; Sylva is a blue dot in a red sea, as it were.
There's also one up in Cashiers that is quite nice, and has a paper copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in all 20+ volumes that I sometimes go there to consult. The local history/legends-of-the-Cherokee section is very valuable there.
Post a Comment