Letter to the Editor on "The Park People"

Dear Oakdale,

Having returned recently from a scholarly stint in the bay, I was dismayed to find uprooted public benches, probing Leader articles, impassioned public debate, and a regrettable disdain for the “park people.” To my chagrin, I felt this personally while walking to Cafe Bliss, when I was curtly accosted by nearby store owner who interrogated meanly: “Are you one of those park people?”

I worry that the recent ordinance that diagnoses the issue as alcoholism is only the most recent contribution to the city-wide discourse about the ‘park people’ that has yielded unhealthy discussions about ‘who they are’, these members of our community. It also ignores many of the contributing factors to the development of such a habit, including but not limited to poverty, which is not an individual but a shared, social issue. This ordinance that endeavors to address the issue simplifies the atmosphere of causes and effects and generates a solution that addresses only a small part.

I want us to come to an effective solution like the rest of you. But labeling a complex and multifaceted issue of poverty, social stigmatization, and the rapid disappearance of the public space as one of ‘public drunkenness’ is misleadingly simplistic and infused with failed, outdated prohibitionist values. While treating a loose group of park-goers as “those people” does little more than create unnecessary fissures in our own community. The issue is far from resolved, so let us focus on creating inventive, inclusive solutions, such as shelters, or simply those that treat these ‘people’ as human beings in order to actually be that loving, inclusive Oakdale we purport to be.

(In my search for city council minutes, I also found it quite challenging to obtain a copy, anything after 2012,, which signals a possible but remediable barrier to public knowledge.)

Risk Aversion?

A risk is a risk because it is a risk and not because it is not a risk. This is the way of the world.

All actions are risks because they project us from what is and has been to what is not and what might be; in any case, some actions and engagements are more risky than others, project ourselves further into conditions about which me may know little.

We have an intuitive sense of this risk, to some degree, as attending to our bodies and what they tell us about our performance and our environment's proffered resources, not to mention our ability to confront likely challenges, is a way to read our own aptitude for facing uncertainty.

It is not foolproof, but it is essential, and we can inform and develop this intuitive sense through research, conversation, reflection and writing. Without it, however, we are dead in the rough, incapable of interpreting even our basic abilities to cope with and adapt to our environment.

Blue Orchards, Coming Now

I awoke this morning to an endless sea
Of blue orchards, opening up before
me. In the distance I could hear a few
(but perhaps there were more,
who knew, really?)
roving mechanical beasts, threshing and
thrashing belligerently, defiantly.

They were coming for me. I could hear
them, approaching, interminably slowly
but with a trembling certitude, a predictable rhythm.
The moment of harvest was upon us.

Hopefully, my windows would hold, though I knew
the shades would falter; they were far too weak
for creatures of that size, animals of that stature.

In the pool of water before me, slight ripples in the
water began to form, widening and narrowing.
They were trying to trying to warn me, like a long-
distance radar.

I wanted to heed their kind, silent signals
But I was paralyzed. I would confront them
here and now, and they would no longer
haunt me...

While the wind blew softly, little more than
a breeze felt upon the cheek.

The General Aesthetic of Oakdale - Chapter 1

Descriptions of Oakdale are typically cast in a pall of the mundane. Fitted neatly into the amorphous category of 'natural,' the physical environment that characterizes this place is what is unique to it. Long, rolling and sometimes verdant but mostly beautifully and subtly golden brown pastures encircled by distant fences and miniature four-legged animals belie the uncultivated view that there isn't much to appreciate here.

So too, the sky illuminates the place at night in a way no street light can, drawing our gaze upward, revealing the moon and a blanket of patched stars and constellations, a canopy of light redolent of the sacred. This is the physical environment of Oakdale, but there is yet more.

The built and constructed environment deserves as much attention, with cowboy boots, hats, saddles, spurs and so many other objects decorating the town, with varying degrees of ostentation. Some proudly wear encrusted, adorned, and sculpted versions of these western accoutrements, sometimes even insignia-d. The local economy generates interest in such artifacts as relevant targets of artistic investment and interest.

People 'need' (to a degree) collaborate with animate and inanimate objects in order to complete their productive projects in order to remain participants in the strictures and pressures of the political economy and to maintain a spot in the tradition and history of this place. Continuing the family line is also of high priority, as it is part and parcel of their place in the community, implicated in a process of resisting incorporation into non-native, non-local ventures that comforts the people who live there, as they think on what distinguishes Oakdale, aside from its convenience as a stop on the way to Yosemite.

Art and political economy are interrelated in important ways here, explaining the emphasis on certain kinds of artifacts and rebutting the claim that there isn't anything aesthetically redeeming here. There are just different objects, different practices, and often ones foreign to novice spectators, the exact kind that are prone to ill-informed speculative judgments that render a place ill-equipped to satisfy their sense of taste or judgement

Aesthetic appreciation, as much as any other activity requires time and focus, attention and effort for attuning oneself to the rhythms of a particular world, their relevant details and what makes them significant. It is about a disposition as much as it is about an object being shiny or beautiful or melodious that makes them noteworthy.

Art objects are defined as such (and further defined as worthy of interest) by certain community-proclaimed authorities, but once we realize that we can all be authorities on these items to some degree on these subjects, then we will be entering a new stage of re-creating this world in the image of ourselves but all of ourselves, including the environment and the flora and fauna that inhabit it, who, like each of us, plays as much of a role in recreating certain parts of it as we do. We should treat experts as authorities, but we should also maintain confidence in our own abilities, as these are real and present in ways that are not readily nor appropriately jettison or scraped.

 (there are so many details that each of one of us focuses on that others fail to appreciate, and it is the successive appreciation by new and different people and communities of this place (and others) that discloses and selects different aspects of the environment, of the social and nonsocial world, that really determines what we produce and leave to the generations that succeed us, our ways of making intelligible the world, describing and reconstituting it)