Let them read TikTok!
That’s what Mayor Eric Adams is telling New Yorkers with his plan to defund public library systems in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
The cuts would mean, at a minimum, no more Sunday hours — for scholars, lovers of historical tomes and of best-sellers alike, and families with kids for whom the cheerful confines of a library are a refuge and a reality check of bogus “knowledge” gleaned from corrupt online platforms.
It reminds me of former Mayor David Dinkins’ threat to close the Central Park Zoo and turn off one of every five street lights in the midst of a 1991 budget crunch.
Financier Felix Rohatyn, who once helped save the city from bankruptcy, called Dinkins’ notion “bad symbolism and bad politics.”
Dinkins’ dire threat, fortunately, came to nothing. But Adams means business.
His library cuts are part of a budget-slashing package sent last week to the City Council, which seems poised to rubber-stamp its every stupid, mean-spirited, city-killing detail.
Libraries have never been more indispensable than they are today. Always a civilizing force, they’re even more vital at a time when vast numbers of city kids pass through our dysfunctional public school system without learning to read. State test scores released earlier this month revealed that only 51.7% of New York City’s third through eighth graders at public school are on grade level for reading.
Libraries are also more vital than ever when adults and children alike take their “information” from online sites which seem deliberately designed to reduce attention spans to mere seconds while spewing exaggerations, distortions and outright lies.
Mitchell L. Moss, NYU professor of urban policy and planning, told me: “Cutting libraries is the moral equivalent of starving those who cannot afford to subscribe to a newspaper or buy an online book.
“Libraries are to New York kids what football is to Texas high school kids — a way up and out.”
But too much time spent in nightclubs has apparently taken a toll on Adams’ once-cogent thinking, and his moral compass.
His budgetary blows to the NYPD and the Dept. of Sanitation — cutting the number of officers back to bad old 1990s levels; fewer public trash cans — have properly set off the most outrage, even among so-called “progressives.” They’re obviously the most dangerous elements of his budget.
The library cutbacks have elicited less howling except from the libraries themselves. But all New Yorkers should be up in arms.
The cuts will reduce city funding for libraries by 5%, from $36.2 million a year to $23.6 million.
The Sunday closings represent more than 14% of total library hours. But the $12.6 million “savings” amounts to a sub-microscopic .0114545455% of the city’s $110 billion 2024 fiscal-year budget.
Even if the migrant crisis actually will cost City Hall more than it can afford — which it most certainly will not, as Nicole Gelinas recently wrote in The Post — how, for the sake of argument, would a measly $12.6 million cutback help?
In that light, it seems nothing more or less than a stroke to punish New Yorkers just for spite.
Adams backed off on a proposal to emasculate the libraries last June in the face of a public, political and media uproar over the exact same cuts.
But it’s too late this time. His recent legal troubles on top of his inability to manage the migrants clearly turned him against the city he long claimed to love.
Every New Yorker who once believed in his promise should throw the book at him.