Thursday, March 29, 2007
In a Foul Mood
Well, here we are on Thursday. Not bad. This week has been the week that Ms LJ is on her "business trip" to Daytona, FL. In March, Spring Break season. Right. All I know is, I'm buying "Girls Gone Wild" next year, and if she's on it, she's in trouble.
But that's not what's got my goat today (Baaaah!). I drove across several examples of the sign above today. My main beef about it is that it is incomplete. It should read "Stop the rail trail. Vote No. Preserve Sudbury's white anglo-cracker heritage. Xenophobes Unite! You have nothing to lose but your white hoods! Ok, you don't have to live in MA to guess that the big argument against this trail would be "property values." Oldest suburban trick in the book. If you don't remember it yourself, you can ask your folks, and they'll tell you that "property values" was the old excuse for keeping people of color and Jews out of various neighborhoods, and keeps the suburbs from bearing their fair share of the burden of mental health, industrial, and other costs in every state in the union. Now, the feds have kindly offered to pay for 90% of the cost of the Bruce Freeman Rail trail, and the residents of abutting properties are promised fencing or screening shrubs, so why are Sudbury folk so worried? I mean, after all, there are a bunch of towns that are already pushing ahead on this same trail. Well, a clue comes from nearby Weston. They killed the Wayside Rail Trail, which was supported by other towns. Sudbury borders on Framingham. Weston borders on Waltham. Each of these town lines marks a quite dramatic differential in wealth. In both cases, a town full of people who regularly drive their SUV's past their neighbors, belching smoke, is worried that people of color, the handicapped, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill, and the working class are now going to have bicycle access to their town. Obviously, this cannot be tolerated. If the portuguese-speaking population of Framingham, riding their cheap big-box-store bicycles with their children, are allowed access to the heart of Sudbury when they aren't there to mow lawns or clean toilets, then who knows what will follow. Generating public recreational spaces will undo much of the work that the Town-income based fake-public school system has done so well.
Ugh.
