Stop Gaslighting People Who Complain about Public Services

Whether it's school parents or transit riders, users of these systems are experts and key stakeholders and complaining is the only way to fix problems.

I am suspicious of people that are constantly loudly praising public services. Whether it’s transit, or libraries, or public schools.

One of them I find particularly annoying is the public library propaganda people. These folks are always sharing memes about how great the library is. IDK if this is librarians or what. It’s quasi religious. Somehow it makes me like libraries less!

I’m a big library user. I’m working on a book rn (my second) with a literary agent (which is what I should be working on instead of this essay). I’m not affiliated with a university, which makes it a little tricky. So I’m trying to rely on what resources are available to me, including my public library. So to be clear, I’m pro library (annoying that I have to say that but, whatever.)

It DOES seem like this idea exists that there’s an existential battle happening between pro and anti library forces, and if you complain about libraries (booo!) you’re anti— part of the problem! One of the bad ones!

To be honest though, I’m always mad at the library system and it’s BECAUSE I use the library that I’m mad. They just aren’t always very user friendly. I keep checking out books — obscure academic books that no one has checked out in literally 25 years — for my book project. And they keep making me return them, even though I’m begging them to make an exception and let me keep them longer than usual (since no one else wants them except me.)

These big institutions though, they tend to be pretty rule bound, hard to navigate. Certain things they do just don’t make any sense to me. I will never forgive Cleveland for getting rid of the first floor “popular library.” (I want a convenient place to browse new titles, like a bookstore kinda.) When I was a Lakewood Library user, they were — this is infuriating, omg are you ready for this — they were… letting people check out NEW magazines, so their whole magazine section was old and random 😡. I could not understand it. When I complained about it, they offered to allow me to check out a new magazine every month (instead of subscribing for $10?!?. Make it make sense!! Gah!)

Here’s my suspicion about all these people who are always memeing about how ideal and magical libraries are: I think they don’t use them. When I go to the library, a lot of times it’s sorta deserted. Everyone’s at home on their computer talking about how they love libraries, presumably. Trust me when I say, the stacks on the fourth floor — business section — of the Cleveland Library main branch — never crowded.

If I’m being honest, I’m constantly pissed off at my transit system too. They closed one of the entrances to my train station. I don’t know why, it’s not clear. And they don’t seem to have any plans to reopen it. Just leaving things broken forever with no explanation, sure, fine, expected I guess? (It requires me to do a detour and yesterday I missed the train because it wasn’t there so I just gave up and walked where I was going.) That’s in addition to the fact that the station has become sort of a homeless shelter and marijuana smoking hot box for high school kids, to the point where if you show up these days and you’re just like a normal person who came there to ride the train, everyone does a double take and is like “WTF?” Le sigh. I feel like we could do better than this.

You can tell who really rides transit and tries to rely on it. I know these people! They are pissed off all the time! They have stories! Ask them!

I feel like the same sorta issues kinda apply to education. I wrote this whole thing recently about how *white parents* got kind of singled out as being *everything that’s wrong with education in America* recently by a popular podcast. This was a lefty/NPR thing and suffered from some of the sort of pathologies that developed in these political quarters over the last half decade, which, imo, led smack dab into our current international political clusterfuck.

I think school parents have been misrepresented, used and needlessly politicized, by right wing actors in recent years as well. When I was complaining about school closures — apologies to my haters, sorry not sorry, but I will literally die mad about this complete atrocity — a lot of people sort of lumped me in with this Moms for Liberty group. I don’t think they were serious, IDK. They were just trying to dismiss me, shut me up perhaps.

I have to say, I can’t relate *at all* to the Moms for Liberty either. As a school parent, I’m always pissed off. My kids rarely have a five day week anymore. For some reason, we only have school during the height of cold and flu season and even then only on random days when the “wind chill” isn’t something the weather people are trying to use to boost ratings, or teachers aren’t attending an all-day training, or it isn’t Election Day, or any one of the various inane and creative reasons we don’t have school during regular work hours practically ever anymore. It just isn’t a very reliable service anymore, especially with two working parents, and it’s bigger than my particular school.

I could care less about curriculum. Even someone like me who is following these internecine education reform controversies in other cities, I’m not that deep in things with my kids schooling where I’m even really all that what aware of what they’re learning. For the most part, I don’t care either. As long as they come back reading and mathing with passable competence, I am happy. I don’t care that much what books they’re reading. If my son read any book, voluntarily, I’d be thrilled. (You should see the complete crap they watch on Youtube!)

I never lived in the type of area where banning books really became a thing and found that whole controversy overhyped compared to the fact that a lot of kids can’t read at all anymore, which for some reason we can’t get very excited about. 😭

I’m actually, finally, sorta happy with the school situation we are in right now, so the point here isn’t to dump on my school or public school specifically. But just being as involved as I am, my kids attend a small, independently-operated school, parents are constantly mad and disgruntled, and usually not for sexy new-cycle related reasons. And some of it, I don’t always agree with. But all kids are different. I’m not the kind of parent having to fight tooth and nail to get my kids’ disabilities accommodated. Kids are different and have different needs. Even though I’m relatively happy, I’m not going to sit here and say that they are wrong.

Listening to these kinds of complaints is very important I think and I say that BECAUSE I am a big believer in public services. Public services are different than businesses. No one is hosting, like focus groups (to my knowledge anyway) at the public library about how user friendly their catalog is (I think that would actually be a helpful exercise.)

And so people using them and trying to get some attention when they fail the public — usually by complaining — that’s a really important part of civic engagement that is the basic mechanism we have for holding these public services to high standards, not idealizing them unrealistically and memeing them on Facebook. That just makes money for Mark Zuckerberg who uses it for something evil that is the opposite of this whole picture they’re trying to paint of what matters and is important by memeing in a self-congratulatory way about libraries.

(Is this meme helpful? IDK)

A lot of people have accused me of being conservative lately. Or maybe it’s a voice in my own mind, saying to me, “man, you are pissed off at Democrats all the time, maybe you ARE conservative.”

BUT here’s the thing. I genuinely like public services, in theory anyway! I want to share! I don’t want a huge yard with no trespassing signs that I have to drive to! I want a nice park where I can run into neighbors. Someone else can mow the lawn. That is the dream for me.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE school. I actually am sorta agnostic about the delivery mode — again the sexy front in the culture war — and I just want to see kids and families well served.

There is no institution in America that can come close to schools, IMO, in community building and general awesomeness. I fantasize about quitting everything I’m doing professionally and trying to become a teacher at my kids school all the time, I just think it’s so positive and important (and maybe I’m deluded about what that would be like.)

But it takes a lot of difficult (largely unpaid) civic work to make these institutions function effectively. Hyping them is not enough. We need to roll up our sleeves and do the difficult work of reforming them and making them function well.

The writer Arpit Gupta wrote something really interesting pushing back on some of the tropes of a lot of urbanist discourse. He takes aim specifically at Strong Towns, which has this sort of propaganda that is anti suburb, is his point. But I think he nailed it. What he says is”

“I’d like to ask the urbanist community to take more seriously the problems of urban governance,” (rather than dunking on suburbs, who seem to be able to deliver services in a more cost effective manner, which many people appreciate). “I think there is much more to be done in complaining about urban areas to improve them,” he says.