Sanguine

I'm not a writer, so this isn't gonna come out like a mind blowing piece of theory or anything but I still ask for you to read it and think on it. Please be patient with my typos and poor wording. This took all my energy for the day. Theres no funny april fools joke here, sorry.

So yesterday was TDOV. I'm trans (you all are looking shocked im sure) I'm also disabled (more shock) and these two things don't exist separately. There is no way in which these "two" things get to disentangle.
I will always be trans and I will always be disabled. Neither of those things are bad things. I am different from other people. My life sucks because of both of these things sometimes. I have experienced great loss and grief because of these things. I can't do things I want to because of these things.
Much like with struggling with finding euphoria in gender I struggle to find meaning and a life while living with a body that needs a different kind of treatment, one that needs constant medical intervention, one that needs more support and solidarity. Frequently more than people are willing to give because, well... capitalism brain worms.
Right now (as always) we find ourselves in a time of struggle. Disabled people continue to be abandoned by the state, and there is a huge lack of solidarity. There is a lack of people attempting to use their privilege as Abled people to create spaces where I can be safe from a deadly and further disabling disease. People buckle under social pressure, take off their masks, and go out and pretend everything is fine. That the pandemic is over.
I'm deeply sorry, it pains me in my soul, it wounds me to say that solidarity with disabled people (and immunocompromised people like myself) does take sacrifice. Social sacrifice. It takes getting tested it takes masking it takes not going out to places where you could aid in the transmission of covid.
Some things are unavoidable, work for instance, grocery shopping, mutual aid work you do.
But if you want to make space for trans people like me, trans people who are disabled, disabled trans people like me who in the increasingly rare moments when my body will allow me to move out of my bed want to be queer and happy and go out and make friends and have sex and have a hobby and be with people... then you have to make those spaces available.
One-way masking doesnt work, much like one-way solidarity. Environments for queer disabled people to be queer take effort. They take sacrifice.
I want to feel safe and loved in my body as a queer person, I want to feel safe and loved in my body as a disabled person. But I can't make these spaces exist. I can't make people take precautions and encourage all their friends to make precautions and act like we're in the beginning of the pandemic. But the reality is, if people don't, I wont get those spaces. Queer people like me wont get those spaces. We will continue out of love for our own lives be forced out of social life, be forced out of necessary medical things we need sometimes even, just because we need to look after our health.
Unfortunately I can't make these spaces. I have POTS and ME/CFS and god so many other things (in the process of seeing if I have a rare blood condition that needs to be treated with chemo, cross ur fingers for me that I don't, I'm already immunocompromised enough lol). I am forced to live my life through the screen of a phone or a computer for the most part. And when I can leave my bed it's to go in for medical procedures or doctors appointments for doctors that refuse to see me remotely. So I ask for support, from other disabled people and importantly abled people, who maybe would rather not think about covid or mass death and disability, and who probably just want things to get Back To Normal. It sucks to think about, it sucks to take more precautions that interfere with our previous societal norms on what a social life looks like and gets to be when the state says "no its totally fine, covid is over, thousands of deaths a month, a week, its normal... theyre all At Risk"...
But theres good news! If you do, if you make space and take precautions (masking, distancing, being outdoors, limiting exposure whenever possible, planning around testing as much as you can with the most reliable tests you can before meeting up, etc) and encouraging others ACTIVELY to do the same (because it's life and death important) then you might by chance find that you're able to spend time with more queer disabled people. You could help make our lives happier, and more fulfilling. Lives that get to experience queer euphoria. I'm truly sorry for all the effort this is to do. I wish the world was kinder. I wish it was easier. But effort to make queer disabled peoples lives full of more joy is so worth it.

u can rechost this if u think people should see it. it's not a vent. u also dont have to.

I'm not a writer, so this isn't gonna come out like a mind blowing piece of theory or anything but I still ask for you to read it and think on it. Please be patient with my typos and poor wording. This took all my energy for the day. Theres no funny april fools joke here, sorry.

So yesterday was TDOV. I'm trans (you all are looking shocked im sure) I'm also disabled (more shock) and these two things don't exist separately. There is no way in which these "two" things get to disentangle.
I will always be trans and I will always be disabled. Neither of those things are bad things. I am different from other people. My life sucks because of both of these things sometimes. I have experienced great loss and grief because of these things. I can't do things I want to because of these things.
Much like with struggling with finding euphoria in gender I struggle to find meaning and a life while living with a body that needs a different kind of treatment, one that needs constant medical intervention, one that needs more support and solidarity. Frequently more than people are willing to give because, well... capitalism brain worms.
Right now (as always) we find ourselves in a time of struggle. Disabled people continue to be abandoned by the state, and there is a huge lack of solidarity. There is a lack of people attempting to use their privilege as Abled people to create spaces where I can be safe from a deadly and further disabling disease. People buckle under social pressure, take off their masks, and go out and pretend everything is fine. That the pandemic is over.
I'm deeply sorry, it pains me in my soul, it wounds me to say that solidarity with disabled people (and immunocompromised people like myself) does take sacrifice. Social sacrifice. It takes getting tested it takes masking it takes not going out to places where you could aid in the transmission of covid.
Some things are unavoidable, work for instance, grocery shopping, mutual aid work you do.
But if you want to make space for trans people like me, trans people who are disabled, disabled trans people like me who in the increasingly rare moments when my body will allow me to move out of my bed want to be queer and happy and go out and make friends and have sex and have a hobby and be with people... then you have to make those spaces available.
One-way masking doesnt work, much like one-way solidarity. Environments for queer disabled people to be queer take effort. They take sacrifice.
I want to feel safe and loved in my body as a queer person, I want to feel safe and loved in my body as a disabled person. But I can't make these spaces exist. I can't make people take precautions and encourage all their friends to make precautions and act like we're in the beginning of the pandemic. But the reality is, if people don't, I wont get those spaces. Queer people like me wont get those spaces. We will continue out of love for our own lives be forced out of social life, be forced out of necessary medical things we need sometimes even, just because we need to look after our health.
Unfortunately I can't make these spaces. I have POTS and ME/CFS and god so many other things (in the process of seeing if I have a rare blood condition that needs to be treated with chemo, cross ur fingers for me that I don't, I'm already immunocompromised enough lol). I am forced to live my life through the screen of a phone or a computer for the most part. And when I can leave my bed it's to go in for medical procedures or doctors appointments for doctors that refuse to see me remotely. So I ask for support, from other disabled people and importantly abled people, who maybe would rather not think about covid or mass death and disability, and who probably just want things to get Back To Normal. It sucks to think about, it sucks to take more precautions that interfere with our previous societal norms on what a social life looks like and gets to be when the state says "no its totally fine, covid is over, thousands of deaths a month, a week, its normal... theyre all At Risk"...
But theres good news! If you do, if you make space and take precautions (masking, distancing, being outdoors, limiting exposure whenever possible, planning around testing as much as you can with the most reliable tests you can before meeting up, etc) and encouraging others ACTIVELY to do the same (because it's life and death important) then you might by chance find that you're able to spend time with more queer disabled people. You could help make our lives happier, and more fulfilling. Lives that get to experience queer euphoria. I'm truly sorry for all the effort this is to do. I wish the world was kinder. I wish it was easier. But effort to make queer disabled peoples lives full of more joy is so worth it.

hundreds of numbers! dozens even! look at all these number!

"Libraries are More than Books"

People talk a lot about libraries are "more than books" all the time and all the amazing things libraries can do to try and justify the existence of libraries. Often these involve expanding the mandate of libraries to cover more and more of society's needs far beyond what librarians are actually trained to do.

I mean don't get me wrong I think it's great that the library provides an air controlled indoor place for unhoused people to sit down for a while on a hot afternoon, but the responsibility of providing unhoused people with an air controlled indoor place where they can sit down on a hot day should be the public housing authority who provide everyone in the city with free housing so all these people have not only a place to sit down on a hot afternoon but also a place to sleep on a hot night, or a place to eat a bowl of cereal on a hot morning, and have it be consistently available.

Likewise people talk about how wonderful it is that libraries can provide Narcan to people with opioid dependencies. And again, don't get me wrong, I am glad that I am trained in administering Narcan and can provide it to people whose lives will be saved by having access to Narcan. But I am not a social worker. I can circulate some boxes of Narcan but I really have no idea what else these patrons need and am not trained or equipped to meet those needs. Many of them are living in encampments, sometimes those encampments are centered around libraries with wi-if extenders (Such as McPherson Square in Philadelphia). I'm so glad we can provide them with wi-fi! Wi-fi is so important in today's society! But why is the focus on "it's great that the library can provide wi-fi to an encampment of people with no housing and provide Narcan so they don't overdose and die" and not "why does our city have encampments of people with no housing and who would die of an overdose if a librarian wasn't running back and forth administering Narcan."¹

Librarians end up trying to advocate for our patrons in ways that are just so far outside of our job training. In library school I learned how to evaluate a children's book to determine what reading level it was at. I learned how to select books for a collection to cover a wide array of topics and backgrounds. I learned how to design floor plan layouts and manage a catalog. I did not learn how to be a social worker.

So long as these social issues exist, librarians are going to continue to fight for our patrons and try to serve these needs that fall into our laps, but I do not want to neglect the library functions of the library as important. So much of why the library is important now is that we have become the basement of America. When people fall through the floorboards, they land on our hard cold concrete floor that you can't possibly fall lower than. So we try to help them get back up the stairs into the house with everyone else. But that's only what libraries have become in our horrible terrible broken society with massive holes in the floorboards.

Governments treat libraries as the customer service department. Oh you need help with this welfare form? Go to the library and a librarian will walk you through it on the public computer. But a library is not a customer service department. You should be able to do the form at the welfare office instead of being sent away. It is the responsibility of the welfare office to help you get your welfare.

What do libraries look like in a society where everyone's needs are already being met? What is the purpose of the library when we are not desperately trying to catch people while still somehow being expected to maintain a wonderful collection of books and movies for some reason? And run children's programs? What are we for exactly?

I have thought a lot about what the fundamental value is of a library beyond what we currently do in our broken society. If the government actually worked and we weren't in a capitalist tar pit then how would we justify the library besides "people like having it?"² If the public housing authority gave everyone housing, and the public utility company gave everyone electricity good air, and everyone had home internet, and our schools were well funded and had their own school libraries, then why would we need the public library?

The Lesson of the Pencil

I grew up surrounded by people associated with the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts. I never liked the LPM and my parents were never members, but there was a lot of members of the LPM in the cult I grew up in, including some of the high up leaders of the cult; and a lot of the LPM's officers were in the cult. So I was exposed to a lot of awful capitalist propaganda growing up which my autistic ass never really believed.³

One piece of propaganda is this ten minute lecture by horrid toenail creature Milton Friedman, one of the fathers of Neoliberalism from the Chicago School of Economics. It's called "The Lesson of the Pencil" and I'm sure you can find it on youtube. It's supposed to be about how efficient decentralized capitalist markets, which he calls "the price system," are able to fairly manage international supply chains better than a centralized commissar. He says a bunch of ridiculous lies about how nobody is being coerced into labor due to threat of violence. Hahaha. Wow. That's extremely not true.⁴ The way he makes this argument though is illustrated through describing the supply chains that lead to the manufacturing of a pencil.

It was very impactful to me though, for completely unintended reasons. In fact, it was a very left-wing influence it had on me starkly opposite of Friedman's intent. As he goes through how the rubber in the erase comes from Malaysian rubber trees, and the wood of the pencil is sawed down in Washington State, and the saws used to cut down the trees had to be manufactured with steel, and the steel had to be smelted at a forge, and the steels had to be made from iron that was mined in South America, and the forge needs all sorts of tools that need building, and so on and so forth. Well what I thought was how incredible it was that every single thing we touch has had the labor of tens of thousands of people around the world going into it. That you can't even write with a pencil without an infinitely connected web of labor.

You can't even write, say, a book, with a pencil, without depending on the labor of tens of thousands of people around the world. In fact, the supply chain is so complicated, it would be impossible to identify every single person whose labor went into that pencil. Because all those workers had to wear clothes, and eat food, and drink water. My autistic brain, unlike Milton Friedman, wasn't able to stop following the chain at "well I don't know where it comes from so I'll stop there." I kept following it. The pencil depends on the water department of the city where the steel forge is to provide clean water for the workers. The water department requires special equipment from a factory somewhere else. And their workers need food, and clothes, and housing, and water. And the housing has to be built with materials, which have to be harvested somehow, with tools, that have to be built. And all those factories and buildings require engineers, and architects, and those architects are using pencils! So the supply chain becomes recursive. It goes on forever.

Eventually you have to conclude that every single thing in global society is the result of the labor of every single person in the global economy. Including feminized labor, like rearing children who become workers. Including teaching those workers how to read. Including keeping those workers enriched with entertainment. And then, because my brain still can't stop following the chain now that enrichment and making life pleasurable has come into the picture, well now I'm thinking about the psychology of all those workers, and what keeps them working. Even unhoused people are contributing to the global economy, because their very existence is being used by the Capitalist class as a threat to the workers to keep them working. The class of people called the Homeless must be maintained by the Capitalists to keep workers afraid of standing up for ourselves.

Except, well, I didn't think of them as The Capitalist Class, back then. But thank you, Milton Friedman, for making me realize this, as a young adult coming into my own ideology.

Labor is Entitled to All It Creates: Literally Everything

When archaeologists uncover the works of art and culture and scientific discoveries of ancient civilizations, we never say that Ykhiv el-Ghu?yr of ancient Sumeria made this. We don't say only he was so amazing. We say these buildings, these frescos, all of it is the product of that civilization. The amazing scientific discoveries of Ancient Greece, not of Pythagoras, not of Plato, but of Athens.

Thanks to Milton Friedman, I realized that every single thing is created by our now global civilization, where there is not this island called America and an island called Malaysia, but rather than there is no America without Malaysia. The cars we take to get to work of made of rubber tires! Everything is due to labor!

So of course the moment I heard that labor is entitled to everything it creates, well, that was intuitive! What did the bosses do? Coordinate logistics? Why does that make them entitled to all of the profits? They can't coordinate those logistics, if they're even the ones doing it, without pencils! From Malaysia!!! Or, these days, probably on computers, using Lithium mined in South America. Everyone is involved. Everyone deserves to benefit.

Milton Friedman claims that everyone is benefiting from the market, but when you look at the world around us, it simply is starkly not true. When water is being privatized by foreign companies in South America, clearly some people are benefiting at the expense of others.

Internally, then, this must also be true. Everyone in America is contributing to America. We are all working. We are all touching each other every day, influencing each other, resulting in each other. Everyone is contributing to the products of our society. There is no Marvel movie without the Starbucks barista who brews coffee for the guy rigging up the microphones. There is no Marvel movie without the people who mined the metal for those microphones, and the people who brewed those coffee beans, and the janitors who cleaned those floors, and the people working at who knows what part of the supply chain who make those cleaning chemicals, and package them, and stock them at the storeroom, and deliver them, and cut down the damn rubber trees in Malaysia for the tires of the truck that delivers the cleaning chemicals to the movie studio.

So who gets to watch the movie?

Everyone deserves art, science, and literature

So here is my fundamental ideology of the library: Every single thing in the library is the l product of everyone's labor. It's impossible to calculate how much you contributed, but you did contribute. It is unjust that we all should toil for this civilization and yet cannot enjoy the fruits of our labor.

So here is the library, to give you the fruits. In fact, the fruit pie!

It's OK for the library to stock things that are pure entertainment. You deserve to enjoy the art that your society produced.

It's OK for the library to stock scientific texts that nobody even reads. You deserve to be able to learn about the scientific discoveries that your society produced, even if you aren't interested in actually doing that.

The fundamental purpose of the library is this: Everyone deserves to be able to enjoy and study the art, literature, science, and other knowledge and wisdom and insight produced by the civilization they work in.

In my dream future, everyone's needs are met without the library. Everyone works a job that makes them happy and they work a healthy amount that fits the needs of their body and at the end of the day they come to the library and go "I have been cleaning the sewers for this city. So that somebody could write a saucy romance novel and shit in their toilet. I deserve to read that saucy romance novel."

I think my ideal future library works like this: Lots and lots of well-staffed branches with well-curated collections. and something like archive.org on steroids that has every published creative work or work of knowledge or whatever from all of human history, also managed by librarians to make it easy to navigate and find the things worth finding. Obviously we can't keep printed copies of every book every published, but hey, there's a free .epub on our People's Socialist Overdrive Server somewhere if you want to find it.

When a new movie comes out, we put a .mp4 on the server, and stock some blu-rays and DVDs in the library. We all celebrate that our collective labor has allowed for the creation of movies.

A new treatise on politics and economics is published. We drop that .epub on the server because we all worked together to allow you to sustain yourself to write that book. Physical copies may or may not be kept at your local library depending on normal collection selection criteria.

We view the library not as charity but as the institution whose job is to give us access to the fruits of our labor as human beings. The books, the movies, and I think I'd expand it to other art forms like games and even visual art and recorded stage performances. We can bask in the joy of our society's collective labor and enjoy that we worked together to allow these creations.

And, likewise in reverse, the artists and writers and such provide those copies to the library for free as a token of respect for all of the labor that allowed them to create their creations. Because you could not have written your book without metal mined by miners, you are obliged to provide those miners access to your book and the library's job is to facilitate that.

That is my library ideology. Alas, we live in a capitalist society, and that's not how the library works. So I'll keep checking the expiration dates on my Narcan to make sure nobody is given expired Narcan and dies. But I hold fast that even if I wasn't distributing Narcan, that person deserve to read every single book published in this country for free, because they're a part of our society too.

1. The answer is Capitalism.

2. Maybe a good enough reason for some but not good enough to convince city council.

3. In fact, it was because of public libraries that I never fell for libertarianism. A friend I respected had once told me she could never be a libertarian because she loved libraries. I also loved libraries, obviously, given my current career. Libertarians argue anyone who wanted to fund the library could just choose to donate to the library instead of paying with taxes. But the people who can afford to give money to the library are not the people who can't afford to buy their own books. The people who need the library most can't afford to donate enough money to it for it to exist. The people with the money have the least reason to use the library. This very simple argument for the existence of taxes bolstered me against libertarian propaganda pretty strongly. Also my other friend who had a libertarian dad really hated Amtrak and I was like how dare you come after trains.

4. I didn't even know about the evils of American imperialism at the time. I basically just thought "well you're describing what is but not arguing against what else could be. This is logically meaningless."