TailOverTeaKettle.com

There is a most excellent point by Vanishing American called “Squandering our riches”. Upon observing that some literary classics no longer appear on library shelves, they also address how the rules in many libraries are ignored and those who would have followed them ultimately move away from the library itself. It begins a cycle where the library no longer preserves the best, but is reduced to a place to hang out.

A piece from the post:

It’s another example of the broken windows theory: the idea that when a broken window is ignored and left unrepaired, the whole building and then the neighborhood falls to decay. So when a broken rule or two or three are ignored, pretty soon everybody has it figured out: the rules are not taken seriously, nobody will enforce them, and thus anything goes. Soon the rulebreakers are in control, while the rule-abiding people have to go elsewhere to escape the chaos, or resign themselves to it. Another obvious illustration of this theory is the abandonment of our borders.
But standards, rules, borders, they’re all so elitist, so yesterday, so Eurocentric.

It’s all a manifestation of the prevailing liberalism of our time: it’s deemed unfair and elitist to demand conformance to rules. Only legalistic prudes want rules enforced, and besides, who are we to judge others’ behavior? After all, homeless people have to bathe somewhere, and why not in the library? And who are we to judge those who want to view graphic porn openly on the library computers? Or read trashy ‘fotonovelas’ in the library? Or turn the library into a hangout and free sidewalk cafe?

The dumbing-down of libraries is just a part of the dumbing-down of our society, part of the leftist war against all standards, against excellence and achievement and civilization, really. Excellence, high achievement, such things are too exclusive, too hierarchical, and to leftists this is intolerable. Anything which does not ‘include’ everybody, which is not demotic and egalitarian, cannot be allowed.

Definitely read the whole thing!