Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Poor Excuses
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has discontinued late fees at the Los Angeles Library. He reasoned they were too much of a burden on groups like low-income families and students. And while you can always dig up people who have an excuse for being late, the people I’ve had to let go of for being habitually late to work never could see their employment as a better excuse for being on time.
Students don’t need to learn to be on time? Tell that to the Los Angeles Unified School District.
And I know that poor families sometimes face horrific challenges, but I’ve never met anyone from a low-income family who was too poor to pay attention. There are only twelve months in a year. The concept is just not that difficult.
But Garcetti opined that the thought the risk of incurring late fees for being irresponsible keeps families up at night, and out of the library during the day. What he is ignoring is that more and more people are surfing the web on their phone for information, and entertainment.
Even poor families, because the federal government will give you a cell phone if you can’t afford one (at my expense).
Still, Garcetti maintains that late fees create a “barrier” to utilizing library resources. Being expected to act responsibly—with the resources I am paying for—creates a “barrier”? Of course late fees create a barrier, in the same way, and for the same reason, we construct roadside barriers; to keep people on the correct path to returning borrowed resources in a timely fashion so the others may use them, and before they are at risk of becoming unnecessarily damaged, lost, or stolen.
Garcetti’s ‘barrier’ isn’t the one formally seen as useful in promoting responsible use. He’s probably getting his idea on barrier from an author mentioned in the same news article that reported on his biblio ingenium.
She reportedly espoused: “libraries are an institution whose primary mission is inclusiveness.“ Really?
Not according to the Los Angeles Public Library, whose mission statement reads:
The Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city’s diverse communities.” [emphasis added]
Maybe she was appealing to a higher authority.
But while even the Library of Congress states that their “vision is that all Americans are connected to the Library of Congress,” their mission statement reads, in part:
The Library of Congress’s mission is to engage, inspire, and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity.[emphasis added]
Oh, and in order to for the Library of Congress to succeed in seeing to it that “all Americans are connected to the Library of Congress” they must have more branches than Los Angeles Library, right?
Wrong. There is ONE. How do they do it? Well there is this thing Los Angeles, and Garcetti, apparently haven’t heard of: Internet!
The Los Angeles Library has 73 branches, and like keeping any old tree healthy it’s time to do some pruning. I do not need to continue to pay to support all those branches when the very Library of Congress can do it on one branch. Further, when reckless polices of ‘inclusiveness’ continue to be implemented, costs are only going to continue to skyrocket upwards from here.
But it won’t do to leave the phrase ‘inclusiveness’ here without turning over its price tag to read the scary figures on the back.
Used by politicians and activists today, inclusiveness actually means lawlessness. If it’s a policy you disagree with, suspend it; a law you don’t agree with, refuse to follow it or enforce it.
This means my earlier threat to appeal to the Los Angeles Unified School District to correct Garcetti for suborning tardiness in student behavior was really a hollow one.
They actually have Board members who are campaigning to confer the full rights of United States citizenship on people who broke federal immigration and law and remain here illegally. One of them recently stated that she is resolved “to explore giving all parents in LA Unified, regardless of citizenship status, the right to vote for their LAUSD Board Member.” Simply put, ignore laws you find objectionable, or the ones without which you would find it more profitable.
Is it me, or did the bell just ring?
Notes:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-13/los-angeles-libraries-end-fines-overdue-books
https://www.lapl.org/about-lapl/about-library
inventions of typography
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Duke de Montosier