I once was attacked
for wearing the wrong clothing. I was a high school freshman, full of
adolescent attitude. The Summer of Love had become the autumn of my discontent
with the “establishment”; my protest took the form of “Mod” (as in “Mod awful”)
clothing. So, a bully wannabe in his black
How sick
and/or dumb are people who do this? I’m reminded of the arena bulls who can’t help but charge the red cape. Gangoons
like this need to be caught and punished, but I don’t think they have a
monopoly on stupidity. Their attacks are just a more perverted expression of
the human need for acceptance, and its popular variant, defining yourself by
what you are not, by whom you have permission to hate. You don’t have to look hard
to see this on a much more sinister level. My current favorite is the
Sunni/Shiite divide (they’re both *Muslims* for cryin’
out loud), who slaughter each over who inherited Islam from Mohammed 1375 years
ago.
Americans,
too, have a need for the universal bad guy, an enemy that feeds the fear that
grants our leaders license to subvert our Constitution and lie about our wars
of empire. What ever happened to the irretrievably evil empire of communists? Gone,
replaced by “terrorists”. And let’s not forget the red state blue state schism
(speaking of which, I’m still waiting to be issued my blue shirt.) This
overused classification conveniently ignores red and blue minorities within a
state, a county, and even the ambiguities within our own minds. “Us, and them,
and after all we’re only ordinary men”, sings Pink Floyd from the dark side of
the moon.
My
immediate reaction to the Staples beating: I want everyone in town to wear a
red shirt some day soon, then a blue shirt a week later. And repeat, perhaps
monthly. Or, as a letter writer suggested, we wear purple, the combination of
red and blue. Maybe we even harder to get these battles onto the playing field
(especially by funding the replacement of the soccer fields we’re losing at
I’ve long
wondered if increased crime and gang violence is the inescapable impact of
population growth, of the transition from cow town to uptown?
Is there another way? We have EIRs to inform the City
Council of the environmental impacts of new projects,
shouldn’t we have Community Impact Reports that do the same for economic and
social impacts? CIRs, like EIRs,
are performed by qualified professionals at developer expense. A good CIR can actually
expedite projects by promoting the creation of good designs up front, rather
than as a result of drawn out community opposition to bad initial designs.
Equally
important, the CIR helps the City ensure that projects mitigate or pay their
fair share of *all* costs to the community. For example, what if a CIR reveals
that the tax revenues and jobs provided by a big-box mall project come almost
entirely at the expense of established locally-owned business? And what if that
project’s net economic impact, considering the cost of expanded City services, turns
out to be negative, and would increase blight and crime in the downtown? With a
CIR, the City could make a better-informed decision about the project. Contact
the City Council and insist CIRs become a part of the
new General Plan.
An unrelated but urgent topic: Streaming radio broadcasts on the web have
become an important way to shrink the world, giving anyone with broadband service
access to a huge variety of music and public affairs programming. It’s
threatened by a proposed federal ruling set to take effect on July 15, unless
Congress acts first. Support the Internet Radio Equality Act. Start with a
visit to http://www.savenetradio.org/