The Motions of Love....

Here we are, the eleventh day of Christmas. I write this on the eighth, New Year’s Day morn. Yesterday, working New Years Eve at RN I got to see my friend Nancy Diaz and briefly share the sad first anniversary of Inglatina Huerta’s death, flashing back to last year.

There was no time this year to retrieve the Gingerbread Woman from the hall closet and hang her in the kitchen window. There was no time for baking cookies, barely enough to send out a few cards. Since Thanksgiving, every spare minute went toward stopping the park demolition.

I failed. Friday, the sixth day of Christmas, Mitch Brown’s equipment neatly scooped up and removed the blacktop that had once been roads through our park. The playground equipment, the picnic tables under the covered area, the trees once shading the community pool were already gone. But Tuesday, the third day, I had asked the city council for the third time to suspend the demolition, especially of the roads, until more public input could be received. This was their answer.

Other park-destroying plans have been uncovered. Did you know the city has plans to build 33 housing units where the Olive Bowl is now? That might explain why it’s gone downhill. The outrage we felt, discovering that, is impossible to report politely. Ed/Brian Rojas, who has been organizing renovation efforts for the Bowl, was devastated. He loves that place, and he’s not alone.

Through public records requests we have found documents from 2008-2009 showing that plan neatly tucked between others appropriately called "infill" projects. The City’s prime focus, however, has been Mission Estates and Sequoia Villas, two upscale developments wedged on each side of the city park by Mormon developer Jim Hunter. Sitting on the north edge of town, Mission Estates can hardly be called "infill." Sequoia Villas, developed on hospital land, is a robbery of public space. But keeping those two developments alive is the only reason for the current park redesign and the construction of Sierra View Extension, which will cost us a million dollars’ worth of unfixed roads. The past lives on in Rich Wilkinson’s administration.

"We live in cynical times," wrote Catherine Whitmire in Plain Living, "and we have become skeptical people: openly lied to by those we elect, betrayed by those who put greed before compassion, and robbed of a healthy Earth by a lifestyle that is not sustainable."

She adds: "We are not called to conform to the ways of the world, but to the motions of love that rise in our hearts. It takes courage to align our personal lives, our work, and the way we spend our days with what we hear when we listen within."

Listen within. Think of what the City has done to our town in the name of progress, driven by greed. Listen to the motions of love that rise in your heart, and see if it isn’t time for a change. Then sign the recall petition.