I didn't go to library school to become a criminal.

(I went to community college to become a criminal.)

If the actions of child molesters don't make us all have to live like prisoners surrounded by video cameras and wearing ID badges:

"(Lieutenant Jeffrey P.) Silva said that two years ago a man tried to lure a youngster at the library away from the child's guardian, but the man fled and the child was not harmed.

Library director Stephen A. Fulchino said in an interview that 29 security cameras were installed after that incident."

and this:

Furious that a convicted sex offender allegedly raped a 6-year-old boy in the downtown library, New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang is pushing for barcoded ID cards for anyone using a library in the city.

Lang, a lawyer and former Bristol County prosecutor, said the goal would be to let librarians know exactly who was in their building, when they arrived, and when they leave. Guests would also have to get special ID cards, he said.

Have libraries always been like this? I remember an instance when I was in the public library and was told by a librarian not to go in the bathrooms alone because a man was caught "doing bad things to children" (or whatever a librarian might say to an 8-yr. old).
I spent lots of time in libraries all through my elementary school years on up through high school. I didn't go there to study, but girls went there to study, and I was there to get their attention. Wait. Maybe that's why I became a librarian, after all. In my mind, libraries equal embarrassing failures with girls. Where I thought I was being cool, but really was just a tremendous pain-in-the-ass. Like now.

What sort of crimes did librarians have to contend with in the past? Did teens terrorize library patrons by riding their velocipedes down the walkway? Did people get mustache wax on the rare documents? Were they listening to record albums and transcribing Beatles' lyrics for redistribution and possible hippy folk song sing-alongs? Photocopying too many pages of a Ray Bradbury short story? Looking up and crank-calling all the people in the phone books whose name began with "A-s-s"?

Crimes will expand to fill space created by technology. Just as good deeds will. I guess it's just an image of the kind of society we have that one or the other will dominate. Right now it seems that the assholes are winning.

I could swear we once had a guy using the Internet who was told to take his hands out of his pants and he said that he'd had surgery and "the beneficial oils from my hands help to promote healing." We told him to go heal someplace else.