This might be generally true, but on the specific topic of libraries it "not even wrong" levels of wrongness.
Anyone, even some little poor kid in the ghetto or a hobo shuffling in, could put in a USB drive to that library computer and walk back our the door a few hours later with his own (superior) library in his pocket. That's not civilizational decline or an impending collapse... it's the miracle of miracles. You went to sleep some night in the past not so long ago, and woke up the next morning in the science fiction future. I don't know the exact day (or even that the idea of a particular date is meaningful here), but it's true.
No one values that library they could have in their pocket. No one reads, because they don't want to. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, I always wanted my own library of movies on VHS, but alas couldn't afford that. I'd get to watch 2 or 3 over the weekend, maybe once in awhile one over a week night (sometime after 1985... prior to that it was hoping ABC or NBC would air a theatrical movie I cared about twice a year, and that I'd be allowed to stay up and watch it). But kids now days don't even want to watch movies/shows. A tiktok video is about all the attention span they have. Is that a policy failure?
Whining that public institutions are sacred, and that libraries need to be worshiped makes it seem like you don't even understand the problem. I would think that you might instead want to celebrate that we live in a world where everyone could have their own library, and might instead spend your effort encouraging them to want one.
> Whining that public institutions are sacred, and that libraries need to be worshiped makes it seem like you don't even understand the problem. I would think that you might instead want to celebrate that we live in a world where everyone could have their own library, and might instead spend your effort encouraging them to want one.
This is a pretty funny comment considering in the previous sentence you complain that 'kids these days' don't do anything but watch TikTok.
What makes you think that both things can't be true simultaneously?
Why is it important to you that the tiktok kids celebrate it with you? If the other little monkeys don't hoot and holler with you, it just feels empty and hollow? Honestly, what they think or feel doesn't even usually enter into my perception.
Anyone, even some little poor kid in the ghetto or a hobo shuffling in, could put in a USB drive to that library computer and walk back our the door a few hours later with his own (superior) library in his pocket. That's not civilizational decline or an impending collapse... it's the miracle of miracles. You went to sleep some night in the past not so long ago, and woke up the next morning in the science fiction future. I don't know the exact day (or even that the idea of a particular date is meaningful here), but it's true.
No one values that library they could have in their pocket. No one reads, because they don't want to. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, I always wanted my own library of movies on VHS, but alas couldn't afford that. I'd get to watch 2 or 3 over the weekend, maybe once in awhile one over a week night (sometime after 1985... prior to that it was hoping ABC or NBC would air a theatrical movie I cared about twice a year, and that I'd be allowed to stay up and watch it). But kids now days don't even want to watch movies/shows. A tiktok video is about all the attention span they have. Is that a policy failure?
Whining that public institutions are sacred, and that libraries need to be worshiped makes it seem like you don't even understand the problem. I would think that you might instead want to celebrate that we live in a world where everyone could have their own library, and might instead spend your effort encouraging them to want one.