Soap Bubble Girl

"Don't praise anyone for doing the bare minimum" is a shitty take that prioritizes your sense of superiority over the actual betterment of people. I understand that things shouldn't be as bad as they are, and anger can often be justified, but you need to get over the propaganda that kindness is naïve, that cynicism and bitterness are intellectual. Withholding praise from those who haven't caught up with you doesnt actually help them, it doesn't motivate, it doesn't encourage, it only discourages them. It breeds bitterness and apathy, which are antithetical to empathy.

!!!!!!!!!!!

A question I get asked a lot while working at a public library is "how do you deal with homeless people?"

I bring this up because today we had a man come in. He stopped at the desk, pulled up a chair and said "I'm newly homeless and was living in my car. I'm disabled. It was impounded. It's raining. I don't have a phone and I don't know where to go tonight."

One of my proudest life achievements was helping a close friend leave a controlling, emotionally abusive partner who happened to work as a librarian. Part of how I knew this guy was a terrible person was that he used his workplace experiences with homeless patrons as a justification for his increasingly reactionary right-wing politics (which were CLEARLY imported from manosphere tiktok, not his job). When she’d started the relationship he was a pretty normy lib with a few hangups from his patriarchal catholic upbringing. When he left his job (and finally got kicked out of her life, at around the same time) he was a trump-voting weirdo with an addiction to expensive men’s fragrances. But somewhere in the middle of that I was telling my friend “this guy is bad news. Every other librarian I know is super compassionate about & appreciative of the unhoused people who come in. I think it’s going to get worse and you should get out now.”