In solidarity with the Minnesotans who are fighting for their neighbors, I am going to break the professional silence I have kept for 4.5 years.
For those who don't know, I worked in a co-op of public libraries in the so-called liberal paradise of the Portland metro area. Past tense, because as of last month, I am now too physically disabled to be able to work--period. I fought the good fight while I could, and now I've lost. But I can still yell.
I'll skip all the stuff you already know about--book bans, bomb threats over drag storytimes, damage and theft of items, budget cuts, so on and so forth. Yeah, I saw all of that, but it doesn't need to be rehashed right now. Keep in mind that all of what I'm about to share is happening in an oh-so progressive blue-colored county that's supposedly "better off" than most other parts of America.
My coworkers found a corpse on the library's front bench outside. Last I heard, he had probably frozen to death. A man who had nowhere else to go, so he died there. A year later, another man set himself on fire on the front lawn during the night and died from his wounds.
When one of my libraries started a program, during Biden's term, that automatically gave all kids enrolled in public school a usable library account, there was a mass panic because parents of the children thought the library would give their family's information to ICE.
We were trained to not give any law enforcement officers access to our systems and information we had unless they gave us a warrant and allowed our county-level admin to review it, but to "stay out of the way and keep ourselves safe" if the officer did not take no for an answer.
Another library I worked at avoided calling the police as much as possible because they would intimidate and threaten the very same people we called them to help.
One of my libraries found multiple paper notes over the course of multiple days instructing interested patrons to meet them in the bathroom for child porn. And additional note was found written by a child pleading for help. We called the police. They said they would do nothing. My manager had to demand that they even give us a case number. Then, for the next couple months, we all went into high alert, desperately playing the part of amateur detectives on top of our normal jobs. Unsurprisingly, we never found the person, or persons, responsible. I still feel sick when I think about it.
In fact, working above and beyond reasonable expectations was and is the status quo because of the many people in need we knew would only be helped by us. The ceiling in one of my libraries leaked consistently in many spots for years before our landlord replaced the roof, causing windowsills to rot and on multiple occasions great cascades of water that destroyed significant parts of our collection. Our superiors made us work and stay open to the public during major construction projects and the presence of "nontoxic" fumes that caused some of my coworkers to be sick for days. Also multiple times. We were underpaid, given poor health insurance (or none at all), and forced to follow workflows that denied our minds and bodies rest. We worked in capacities for which we were never trained and rarely paid. We all tried so hard, but the will to just "power through" could not stop mine and my coworkers' bodies from deteriorating into frequent illnesses and chronic health conditions from all the stress we were under. I say all of this not so you can feel sorry for us, but so you understand the depth of what I mean when I say--we allowed this to happen because we were afraid of what would happen to people if we didn't. The library cannot afford a workers' rights lawsuit. It cannot afford to train new staff for a high turnover rate. And if the library goes, so do all of the people we have been supporting who have nowhere else to turn.
And the real cherry on top, while the libraries in our "progressive" county are facing increasingly insurmountable challenges on all sides?
The county decided, with no input from the public or even staff from the libraries, that it will take control of ALL of the materials distributed between the INDEPENDENTLY OWNED AND RUN member libraries of our co-op, leading to the layoffs of at least one department of staff at each of the 16 libraries, and a MASS seizure of publicly available media to be controlled and censored as they see fit (or perhaps how their government superiors see fit). Our library director had to fight to even be able to tell the rest of library staff about the major decision, and it was made without any plans for the logistics of its achievement. It's projected to cost millions of dollars, but the county insists it's to address budget cuts. The "official announcement" they gave the public is intentionally vague and misleading.
I'll stop with the details because, to most people, they won't matter. What I want every American reading this post to take from it is: You. Are. Not. Safe. Your community. Is. Not. Safe. I grind my teeth every time I hear someone talk about the Portland metro area like it's some kind of liberal haven. It's a common point of comedy to comment on how "extreme" our progressivism is.
If extreme progressivism means people dying in the streets with no resources, being intimidated and belittled by cops who won't lift a finger to stop a child sex trafficking operation, and the local government working to actively wrest control from and neuter the agency of centers of local, independent information and community resource distribution? Imagine what is happening in YOUR safe little political bubble that you don't know about because all the people privy to it are playing a game of suck up and shut up in the hopes they'll be able to leverage their position to stop it from the inside.
I've never considered myself an activist, but these days it seems just having a strong moral system is enough to make you one. This post is probably poorly worded, coming from a place of pure fear and outrage outpouring in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping, and I expect I'll get shit for that. I still write it with anxious anticipation because, even though I no longer have to fear professional retribution, I know that all it would take for a displeased and malicious government to off someone as disabled as I am is a bureaucratic hangup with my health insurance. But then again, people as disabled as I am are always among the first to be targeted by such governments regardless of the "political" opinions we express, so maybe it doesn't matter much in the long run, anyway. I just hope that, in one way or another, disclosing the fighting I did and lost will cause the people who still can to take it up behind me.
