Homeless in Mass. Sue Over Library Policy

Homeless in Mass. Sue Over Library Policy
By ADAM GORLICK
Associated Press Writer

August 9, 2006, 3:23 AM EDT

WORCESTER, Mass. -- Robert Bombard has always been a voracious reader. He worked at the city library as a teenager and was a volunteer there as an adult. Even when he served two years in jail on a drug charge, he did his time working in the lockup's library.

"I revere books," Bombard said. "I treat them very well. I wouldn't even put an open book down on the table because I don't want to hurt the binding."

So when Bombard went to check out more than two volumes after spending a day as a volunteer at Worcester's main library branch last summer, he was shocked when they told him no.

"They said 'Oh, no -- you live at a shelter,' right in front of everybody," he said. "It made me feel like a second-class citizen."
(snip/...)

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-homeless-library,0,5669967.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

i wish Boston would enforce some kind of rule to this effect.

A beautiful library befouled by stinking, snoring drunks.

:popcorn:

Atleast they are trying to remove themselves from the situation they are in BUT if they come in making a scene and/or start stinking up the place they should be shown the door.

it wasn't at all about drunks being in the library, it was about a person who had no address not being able to take out more than 2 books at a time.

:eyes:

And I hope you never find your self stinky, snoring and drunk. God forbid.

:puke:

They should have took him aside and told him no, and explain why. There is probably some sort of policy in place about having a permanent address or something for borrowing books.

zalinda

It was handled very badly -- very bad patron service.

That's just terrible. It is a PUBLIC library after all.

according to the article.

the Machine has become...

Well scumbag robber barons like Andrew Carnegie look positively communist:

Andrew Carnegie insisted that the libraries he helped to create were kept 'free'. He was concerned that later cuts in municipal budgets could lead to admission charges for library use.

The Trustee's of such libraries had to accept a form of agreement which specifically stated "The Library shall be free to the people forever........."

In many of these libraries he insisted that the word "Free" be engraved in stone on the building to ensure that the library would always be free to the public.
Carnegie Free Library Foundation

"...Carnegie also believed that achievement of financial success could be reduced to a simple formula, which could be duplicated by the average person. In 1908, he commissioned (at no pay) Napoleon Hill, then a journalist, to interview more than 500 high and wealthy achievers to find out the common threads of their success. Hill eventually became a Carnegie collaborator, and their work was published in 1928, after Carnegie's death, in Hill's book The Law of Success (ISBN 0879804475) and in 1937 in Hill's most successful and enduring work, Think and Grow Rich (ISBN 1593302002). The latter has not been out of print since the day it was published and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. (In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book containing the Andrew Carnegie formula for wealth creation. For years it was the only version generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised, which restored the book to its original form, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained.).."
Carnegie

The ironic part is that Carnegie and many others, the early liberal reformers, believed that if the downtrodden (like homeless people) had access to literacy and books, then they would then be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Carnegie and others were were concerned at the time that the worker was spending his time being taught by commies and reformers who were teaching them to read seditious unAmerican 'commie' stuff and not enough of the good old practical business stuff that would turn them all into successful little businessman.

I point this out that EVEN given the fact that some of the motives of Carnegie and his ilk was to 'control' what the masses read, they NONETHELESS were far more charitable than what passes for 'liberalism' these days.

(On a personal note: I find it galling here as elsewhere that rightwing jerks like to think of themselves as Progressives and then lecture, when they don't they know jackshit about the history of the Left, the don't EVEN know the history of Liberalism!

the motto of the wealthy/regressives today is: I got mine, screw you.

These are the same people who have no knowledge of, or interest in, history...the last group of people who had the same philosophy wound up 9" shorter after a visit to Madame Guillotine.

Sheesh, let the homeless check out books. Many of them do have a "mailing address" at a shelter. The response of the staff was incredibly insensitive.

Worcester, Massachusetts, home of the right wing machine. :sarcasm:

I think you'll have a hard time finding a repuke in Massachusetts to blame this on unless Mittens is setting library policy now.

I can understand why the library might want to bar them. But for the guy in the article -- not being allowed to check out the books because he lives at a shelter is unfair, considering that he's clearly not the stinky, disruptive, loitering type.

he already has checked out before checking more out. Why can't he finish the two books and go back later for others?

I really see no problem at all with this.