[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
East Phillips Park why do people with the most need get the least services?
Peavey Park- should we let gangs be the only people that are organizing park
activities in this park?
This is the saddest local story I've read this week. This did not need
to have happened.
The community as a whole (all of Phillips with NRP money) was funding
more organized use of Peavey Park, thus keeping some of the worst of the
worst at bay for some hours of the day and giving hundreds of kids
organized free time for their safety. I distinctly remember notes
crossing my desk outlining improvements for East Phillips Park. Four
Winds School and the Phillips Eye Institute were anchoring one end of
Peavey Park. Both of these parks are surrounded by tight housing, small
or no yards, and big families.
This is a disgrace. And, like Neva, I'll point the finger at myself
first, and some of my dearest friends and neighbors second. Instead of
keeping on RTs case all day every day, we retired from the fray and let
the mayor and the boards swan around like so many ladies of the parlor,
wrecking all the work we had done. How dumb was that?
I distinctly remember making the decision that it was time for these
young turks to prove their mettle. They'd been strutting around like
cocks of the walk bragging about how they could do such a better job
than SSB and the previous park board at keeping the parks in good order,
to indeed prove that they could do so and grace the city better than
their predecessors had done.
The proof is in the results Mr. Vreeland catalogs and what our eyes can
see as we walk and drive around Peavey and East Phillips parks. The
young turks have not kept the city in good order nor have they had the
strategic sense to focus what resources they had where their levees were
the weakest (to shamelessly mix metaphores). They allowed the police to
languish as well, so that the abandoned parks reverted to nests for
preditors.
The city as a whole lost in this struggle, not because it was necessary
to pull in its horns and solidify the gains it had made through the NRP,
but because the new management could not think strategically, so
reverted to thinking in a bunker mentality that overbuilt the already
strong levees and allowed the fragile sections of the city to cling on
for dear life, devil take the hindmost. This is how race and class are
so embedded in our institutions and our minds that the minute things
look less than rosy, we revet to our lizard brains. This is the
counter-productive way to keep ourselves organized and progressing.
In my estimation, whoever was the person who, logically, should have
supplanted SSB, that person did not step up to be counted OR, and here I
fault my own ignorance, we DFLers did not insist that the ones who have
strategic sense stand for the jobs.
While I am willing to grant that it was time for SSB to move to the next
level of political madness, what we settled for has proven itself a
shabby second. I'll take my lumps as well, for even allowing the park
board and RTs troops to behave so counter-productively in Phillips
community, my next door neighbors. We should have been there and on the
mayor, council, and all the boards like wasps to block them from their
worst excesses. Instead we licked our wounds and left them to it.
WizardMarks, Central
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