Oh ye of little faith.
When I began posting on Daily Kos about my campaign to protect the western end of Golden Gate Park from the instillation of toxic tire crumb, there were murmurs (justifiable at first) that such a topic was too insular. Who knew that NBC Nightly News would come to our rescue in a shocking expose on the matter.
And immediately following those exposes earlier this October came the Mission Playground DropBox fiasco, further underscoring the dangers of privatizing recreational space, at least under our current Rec and Park regime. The philosophical stars seem to be aligning for Yes on Measure H (saving Golden Gate Park’s west-end soccer fields from hundreds of tons of tire crumb infill) and No on Measure I (the poison pill meant to override H and simultaneously give Rec and Park even more power for itself over ALL park space in San Francisco).
Can you respect athletic kids without respecting tire crumb soccer fields? The answer should be yes, but for the proponents of Measure I, it can never be. Hence, the pitfalls of running a What about the children? campaign. Take with a healthy grain of salt any politician who hides behind a bassinet in order to make policy pronouncements, especially when they don’t even have kids in the first place.
Besides the half a million dollar donation from the heirs of Donald Fisher, this line of “reasoning” (a logical fallacy actually) is all the Measure I campaign has to offer. That and a handful of conservative endorsements. My side (healthy grass for healthy kids and preserving neighborhood parks) has plenty of organizational endorsements – I made certain of that. No trust fund required; no trust fund present.
As the campaign winds down to Election Day this November 4th, I have yet to find any intellectual innovation on the other side, for which I am both grateful and disappointed. A full page ad buried in the San Francisco Chronicle magically linking Measure I to the World Series. (Soccer and baseball are different, assuming that matters.)
Mailers have come, gone, and will come again, but I was taken aback by a joint editorial written by Supervisors Malia Cohen and London Breed in the San Francisco Examiner. I am friendly with them, but if I crash their City Hall holiday parties, I will probably be treated as cordially as a rich villain from a soap opera.
In it, they pat themselves on the back for saving the children by putting Measure I on the ballot, in order to counteract the actions of, well, me and thousands of other folks who signed a petition to vote on this toxic tire crumb project collectively as a City: renovation, not environmental destruction.
Assuming there is a correlation, I am deeply concerned with young goalies contracting lymphoma and leukemia on this stuff. That value set needs no corny posturing.
See you on Election Day.