Bashing the Atlanta Braves and all their dumb greedy business decisions is like the gift that keeps on giving. Whenever I think I’ve written about the last Braves-related fuck up for a while, more and more just keeps coming out in recent days, which is hilarious considering the unofficial start of the baseball season kind of starts next week.
Just recently, there was the news report about the financial shortcomings of ScumTrust Park, and how WSB was investigating and digging for some justifiable answers with the Braves naturally holding their hands close to their hearts under lock and key and mountains of rehearsed rhetoric. But because public money is involved, there’s always a way to get some degree of clarity, and it turns out that Cobb County is in nearly $30 million dollars of debt on account of ScumTrust Park and the predictably low-impact of its repayment terms.
It’s no surprise that this happened, but the great unknown was always what exactly was going to be the result of the Braves putting the county into the hole. I figured an increase in tax, like a penny here or a half-cent there would be tacked on somewhere to make up for the deficit, but it looks like that the county has just decided to Tomahawk Chop™ off the public libraries of the county in order to make up for the shortfall.
Neat. Start closing off libraries in order to pay for a fucking baseball stadium, and deny children and other people the simple pleasure and/or benefit of, books. Cobb County has some of the better-rated schools in the state, but it sounds like they’re willing to forfeit some of this ranking in exchange for a baseball venue that only really draws the majority of its money during the baseball season, and not much else.
This rubs me the wrong way not just because I enjoy bashing all the dumb shit that the Braves do/cause, but because this is actually a repercussion of their choices that actually matters. Libraries seem kind of inconspicuous and dorky to the cool kids, but there’s no denying the benefits to communities that they are capable of providing. Education, imagination, enlightenment, safe spaces to learn and accomplish work, among all sorts of growth potential. Taking these things away from communities because some greedy politicians fucked the populous is really abhorrent.
I’d rather the county tack on a penny tax here and there and have it potentially impact my own wallet than shutting down fully functional libraries. Most people can handle paying an extra penny here and there, and a whole lot of them would probably very quickly make up for the shortcoming, and then the county could predictably delay the ending of the tax and use it to pad their own coffers. But shutting down libraries has immediate impact, and once closed down, people will be forced to adjust and either find ones that are still open, but more likely just not go, because it’s inconvenient. Children will be denied a resource, and all people who like to go to them for work purposes lose a quiet place for productivity. Even if they re-opened them again later, it will take time to get people back in their doors, and inevitably restore their collection of books and media.
But nope, if the county has any say in the matter, they’ll just shut down 6-8 libraries, which is mind-blowing in its own right to me, because in my old, predominantly black neighborhood in which I lived in, I couldn’t even think of a single library, much less 6-8. If they shutter 6-8 libraries, will Cobb actually have any left?
Either way, this is bullshit. Libraries are things that are actually important. As much as I like baseball, believe it or not, it is not as important as a place that can actually contribute towards the education, enlightenment and improvement of people. But leave it to greedy businesses like the Braves and the greedy local politicians to stick it to the people and wreck infrastructure and shit that actually matters in order to pad their own pockets.
