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| "look at that pelican fly!" - Scarface |
This idyllic expectation was in full effect last week (Fri Jan 4 I believe) as we meet up at an oak grove where a small treehouse had been placed. "Some folks just came by in their truck and hauled away that old couch" laughed my friends, as they recounted a goofy story of citizen participation in cleaning up the park (the couch had been seen at various spots in the park, run over by lawnmowers, beaten to hell, and was last seen dilapidated in the oak grove). A few yards away, several kids climbed around the treehouse with their granddad. "I used to play golf here back when it was a course, but this may be the most fun I've seen people having," he chuckled, admiring his future generations. As the kids climbed around, a big white truck pulled up with a smiling man and his dog. Smiling Man hopped out of his truck and in near-silence threw a rope over a tree branch, fashioning a swing which was immediately put to use by the kids + their grandpa, but not before he took a few moments to test it out. Nothing is better than a large man on a little swing on a sunny day. At this point I was almost laughing out loud at how goofily serene of a moment we had stumbled upon, days after the recurring conversation of "gunshot or fireworks?" had been driving me mad.
On his way out I asked the Smiling Man if he worked for the park, and found out that he was simply a nice guy taking his dog for a walk, had some extra rope, and thought that kids would enjoy a swing in the area. He was correct. Duh.
Next time I saw him, he was stopped by a NOPD cruiser, lights ablaze. A sinking feeling approached faster than the cops could stumble through the knee-high grasses. When the two officers reached the grove of trees, the children had walked away (its funny how kids sometimes sense bad vibes approaching, like animals running inland in the moments before a tsunami) just in time to miss Officer A pull out his knife and cut down the swing without hesitation.
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| "it led a short life but brought smiles to all who rode it, while pointing to larger-scale inadequacies brought about by the insurance racket. RIP" |
He didn't stop here though, as he huffily grilled my friend and I about "why that guy put up a swing" and how "people can't just do stuff like that." "This treehouse is gonna have to go, NOW" he growled, as his good-cop partner took pictures, climbed around, and beamed that it was actually pretty damn nice. We tried to maintain non-emotionally-blinded inquiry, finding out that (even though the overgrown, dog-eating-gator inhabited, crumbling-building-dotted, hole-spattered, fire-ant laden plot of land was constantly enjoyed by all ages in a safe manner) someone "could fall off of the swing and die", leading to liability issues.
Well are you gonna stop building bridges too, if you have a problem with people sleeping under them? People can fall off of them as well, you know. And then there's the issue of "well, it's City Park's land", which touches on issues of increasingly privatized resources in New Orleans as well as the rest of the world and the fallowing of urban space as problem to be solved by use dictated by needs + the users' self-determination. But then I'm reminded by this incident that City Park isn't so much concerned with the well-being of their "users," but its continued existance as a corporate entity: proposed skate parks are fee-based, historic live oaks are planned to be destroyed for soccer fields, and the land enjoyed by a diverse many (humans + wildlife!) is to be converted to a bleak resource-draining playground for a select few.
Here's City Park's Master Plan for 2018. Check it out. It's not all gross. But what IS gross is that people so often grow up being instilled with the idea that they are not allowed to make this world better by direct means, and when they come across people pushing agendas for happiness and self-improvement, they see those same do-gooders cut down like a rope swing before any actual reflection is given to the situation, simply because it is an outlier to the expected modes of creation (going thru the regulated avenues that so often deflate any positive momentum) and therefore, by virtue of being "other" and irregular, something to be feared. Neoliberal regulatory attitudes towards existence and creation - the same attitudes pushed by the affluent that have, for example, stifled small businesses because "signs on telephone poles are trashy and bring down property values" - provide:
-a labyrinth of suffocation for those who want to make change through officially recognized avenues,
-persecution and branding as "bandit" for those who cannot afford (via time, $$, or other resources) to go through officially sanctioned channels or choose not to out of general practicality
-more excuses to tighten regulatory statutes (through municipal governments or organizations involved with public interest) because it's in their interest to force everyone to swim down their regulated stream by penalizing those who choose otherwise even if it's at no cost to others
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| "Fear is the Mind-Killer" - Bene Gesserit litany |