I can't shut up, but I can't afford to stay very bitter, either. Some of the boys here can be infuriating. I still find endearing the belief that Business Is Always Good And Government Is Always Bad. I like them. Some things I've learned to ignore, and some things I have repeated so often that I bore myself, so I just give it a pass.

I'm a public servant myself, a public librarian, so I admit to having a conflict of interest when it comes to interpreting what should be funded by government and what should be privately funded only. I might mention that we just lost our reference librarian to a private organization that could afford to pay him almost $5,000 more a year. Some publicly funded jobs in America award a person holding a master's degree and special skills $13/hour and two weeks of combined vacation and sick leave. The feds are better funded than the states, which are better funded than the local governments, as a rule. The wealth of Croesus doesn't all accrue to the public employees. But there you go.

I have noticed that people who squawk the most about providing tax moneys for public services are the ones who can mostly afford to pay for things themselves. Not funding services for those on the lower end of the economic structure provides a certain amount of support for the status quo. If we have greatly reduced public expenditures, we also have greatly reduced opportunities for people on the bottom of the pyramid to better themselves and threaten the positions of those closer to the top. This keeps them on the bottom, where only the genius can break out alone, and the talented must find mentors in the educated classes.

Some research in my profession suggests that economic downturns are pretty good news for libraries, not only in the US, but also in Finland and Japan, as far as increasing usage, and building innovative facilities. Unfortunately, it also means squeezing the public employees until we're beat and burned out. I'm working in a new facility that has tripled its floor space, increased its number of public access computers by a factor of 10, and increased its hours. It's a wonderful space. We can afford only two full-time employees, and have increased our total staff from 6 in the old building to 9 in the new one. I am so tired I can hardly think straight; later on, I'll be doing the monthly report on my (only) day off, because I'm helping patrons all the time when I'm in the building. This is, unfortunately, typical in my state, and another reason we lost a wonderful reference guy to a private organization. But that's the way it works in business, isn't it? People have been asking me, fearfully, "Are you leaving too?"

Social workers dealing with child care issues (who I see on family literacy-related matters) and probation officers (with whom I often work, finding alternative sentences for non-violent youthful offenders) are similarly squeezed: bigger work load, though the day is still 24 hours long. But without help and support, people will stay in their same old hopeless groove, and give the lie to the dream of the meritocracy and upward mobility.

Conservatives that I know, especially here, tend to express morality in terms of individual actions and patriotism in terms of collective actions. I tend to look at it the other way, because of what I see in my world and at my job. While I agree that one's personal morality often hinges on the decisions one makes for one's self, I also see that some decisions are profoundly limited by ignorance and poverty, conditions beyond the scope of one individual to help unless he happens to be Andrew Carnegie -- who created many of the conditions that he later corrected through philanthropy -- or Bill Gates -- whose company, to judge by the remarks, has few friends here. ;)

Sometimes a society has to act collectively to provide something resembling a chance to its less able members. I think that the quarrel we have on this board is not whether this is true, but to what extend it is to be pursued.

Keep sluggin'!

Regards--
Mary Anne