Stolen from here: https://social.marxist.network/@yogthos/113583918563324620
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Just for transparency's sake before I go into this, my wife is second from the top at the library.
The library here really did have to remove benches outside in a couple of places (in part) because of homeless people. Not because they were sleeping on them, there are other places outside the library where the homeless can sleep and the library does what it can to help the local homeless community.
Unfortunately, some (far, far from most) of the local homeless around the library were either very publicly using drugs or getting so fucked up on those drugs (or possibly just having a really bad mental illness episode) that they were harassing people and scaring kids. So when it came time to replace all of the benches since they got too old, they decided that they would not replace some of them.
There was definitely a big outcry about how the library was being anti-homeless, but it was nuts because there were people on the other side still complaining about how the library always stinks because they let the homeless people in there. I may be biased because of my wife, but I'm also a regular patron and I'm pretty much on their side on this one. It was becoming a huge issue and they really didn't want to keep getting the cops involved because they rightfully don't trust what the cops might do with the homeless and only end up calling them as a last resort.
Society has absolutely failed those people though. There is no question about that. But at some point, the library had to draw a line at how accommodating they could be.
Biggest drug dealers in America - the Sackler family - weren't worth our time to punish. So some guy who washed out on Percocets and can only afford Fentanyl shouldn't have a place to sit.
In America you have two options -
The very idea of housing, treatment, and rehabilitation is too socialist to consider.
I didn't say being publicly intoxicated, I said publicly using drugs. As in they were shooting up while kids were being taken to storytime past them on the way to the library.
The library allows homeless people to be inside it from open to close. They give them free internet. They give them free help filling out necessary government forms. They hang around just to chat. They allow homeless people to sleep outside all around the building. They are literally building a shower and a washer/dryer facility in the new auxiliary library free for anyone to use.
In America, your local public library does more to help homeless people than anything you have probably done yourself, but I guess since they haven't personally solved the problem, they're the worst of the oppressors.
We have a solution for this as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_injection_site
Proven highly effective for reducing crime, mitigating the need for emergency response, curtailing disease spread, and channeling addicts to rehabilitation clinics
But because it comes off as permissive and benevolent, rather than punitive and prohibitionary it remains Haram in much of the US.
It's a public service staffed with dozens of people. Of course a single person isn't going to do more in spare time than a team of people doing the work professionally.
But that doesn't excuse the rest of the state for tearing out local infrastructure as a means of tormenting the homeless.
"I did two good things so I have permission to do one bad thing" isn't sounds public policy.
From my initial post:
It's not the library staff making these decisions. Its inevitably the city council or the governor
It was not in this case, it was the chief administrator of the library.
Deciding on which benches are placed in the subway?
I thought we were talking about the library now, not the subway. Otherwise, why did you say this?