Pip: Welcome to The Babblings of JT — where the topics this week include public shaming, public libraries, and the very public question of who actually gets to use either.
Mara: JT Santana covers two connected territories here: the politics of poverty and who gets blamed for it, and the public library as one of the last civic spaces that still opens its door without asking why you’re there.
Pip: Let’s start with the shame — and who it’s actually aimed at.
Poverty, Political Shame, and the Redirect
Mara: The central argument is that decades of political rhetoric have deliberately pointed shame downward — at people using SNAP, at foster youth, at students skipping meals — rather than at the policy choices producing that hunger in the first place.
Pip: The post names names, which is the whole point. The piece puts it plainly: “the people who should feel ashamed are not the hungry.”
Mara: And the upshot is that this isn’t just a rhetorical flip. When Congress can fund military spending and corporate tax breaks without blinking but suddenly becomes, as the post puts it, a room full of accountants the moment poor people need groceries, that asymmetry is a policy choice, not a budget reality.
Pip: Former foster youth losing SNAP exemptions is the part that lands hardest — a population the government failed, now being told to prove they deserve food.
Mara: The post is direct about that: young adults aging out of foster care already face higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity. Removing their exemptions isn’t reform. It’s a second abandonment.
Pip: Which brings us to the one institution that still opens the door without a receipt.
The Last Free Room
Mara: The library post opens with a frame worth sitting with — that there are almost no places left in America where a person can walk in without being expected to buy something, prove something, or explain why they deserve to be there.
Pip: And then it makes the case that libraries are exactly that exception.
Mara: The post puts it this way: “A library does not ask whether someone owns a home. It does not ask whether they have a degree, a clean background check, a full refrigerator, a perfect credit score, a car, a spouse, a church, a political party, or a five-year plan. The door opens. That is the radical part.”
Pip: Which is either the most wholesome sentence in American civic writing or a devastating indictment of everything else. Possibly both.
Mara: Both, honestly. The post makes the infrastructure argument seriously — Davenport’s three library branches, the State Library of Iowa’s note that 75 percent of Iowa public libraries serve communities of 2,499 people or fewer, the IMLS federal funding that flows through to local services. These aren’t decorative amenities.
Pip: Four hundred and eight libraries in very small communities. That’s not an urban luxury. That’s a rural lifeline.
Mara: The post also covers the book ban data from the American Library Association — 5,668 titles banned in 2025, the highest number documented since tracking began in 1990. And ALA notes that more than 90 percent of challenges came from politically motivated groups or state officials, not individual parents.
Pip: So the same political energy that shames people for needing food assistance is now shaming libraries for letting people read.
Mara: The post connects those threads directly. Cuts to IMLS, the federal agency supporting libraries, follow the same pattern as SNAP restrictions — find the institution that serves people with no private alternative, and make it harder to access.
Pip: Hungry people and readers — apparently, both too expensive to serve.
Mara: The through-line is consistent: when public institutions get cut, the people with private alternatives barely notice. Everyone else does.
Pip: More from JT next time. Worth reading the originals.
