Something has been bugging me for a couple weeks, ever since the
Driscoll Incident.
Dan Voelpel started it. Driscoll carried it on. Neither of them can really be blamed, though, because since then it just keeps going and going, popping up nigh everywhere. To quote Voelpel's Trib article:
Fired up by the inspiration, some in the crowd decided they needed to act to take back Frost Memorial Park, next to the North Park Plaza parking garage, from the ne’er-do-wells who hang out there.
Ever since then, the phrase "take back the park" has been bouncing around the feed like mad. Everyone's saying it, from
participants to
academic observers. And, quite frankly, it's just making us look like idiots. Any outside reader with a little bit of neighborhood activist experience is going to look at this and say "What? You can't drive off unwanteds by eating lunch in a park on a sunny Friday at noon." And they would be absolutely right. If we really were out to get "ne'er-do-wells" out of our neighborhoods, the lunch hour is not the time to do it. How much criminal activity or whatever was really going on that we somehow foiled? Probably none. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I haven't seen a lot of crack dealers trying to cash in on the lunch rush.
I mentioned in an
earlier entry the group of elderly women who set up a card table on a drug-ridden street corner and played bridge in the middle of the night. That's how you drive off criminals... go to a place where they are, when they are there, and plant yourself. The notion that the same thing will be achieved by what we did (and will continue to do) is ludicrous.
So what were we doing? When
Patricia first brought it up at the
Go Local event, her reasons were fairly clear: word on the street suggested that the city was looking at constructing a fence around the park to discourage criminal use. Unfortunately this has the side-effect of discouraging legitimate use as well. However, as it stood, the trade-off was an easy one to make because there simply weren't enough law-abiding park-goers. The goal, as I understood it from Patricia, and passed it on to the feed, was to demonstrate use, and thereby prevent the fencing off.
Unfortunately, once one article latched onto the "take back" notion, everything got twisted around. Driscoll took Voelpel's statement and, curious to see what "taking back the park" was like, went down there. I would have been curious too, if I hadn't organized it to begin with. The fact is, even if we had been there in force that day he would almost surely have been unimpressed. We aren't demonstrators. We aren't vigilantes. We're barely even activists at this point. We're a bunch of businesspeople and residents using a park the way it ought to be used: eating lunch, socializing, networking.
I fear that a lot of this is just shades of the "flash mob" debacle from last year... one person uses a phrase not recognizing that it doesn't fit the circumstances, a couple other people latch onto it because it's catchy. Those being described object at first, but eventually pick it up as a joke. Eventually it has entered common use and everyone has forgotten that it has very little to do with what was actually going on.
I'm all for taking back the park. Any of them. If anyone feels like meeting in the same park at 1 AM on a Saturday morning, I'll show up, guitar and all, and lead a frickin' sing-along. I won't do it by myself... stories of this working demonstrate that it is most successful with a group large enough that the aforementioned goons and dealers recognize that they won't be able to intimidate them. I don't care how afraid you are to walk around by yourself at night... nobody is going to attack a band of 10 bystanders just so they can sell a rock or two.
But I'm also all for what we're doing now. Because I think it is important. But it's also important to understand what's really going on. The fancier our label, the loftier we make our goals seem, the less impressive our effort becomes. We did a good job of using the park as a park. But if you pretend we were trying to reclaim it from villainy, we just look like a bunch of misguided incompetents.
And here's the kicker: it really is largely my fault. If I had thought of all this before
everything got started, I probably would not have gone with:
We can keep the dialog going and start retaking our public space at the same time.
In my head I was thinking much more eagerly of the idea that one meeting wasn't enough, and that getting everyone together with whatever excuse would be good to keep up the dialog. Unfortunately I didn't think my phrasing through and now this "take back the park" catch phrase is rattling around the blogosphere, when it really shouldn't be. We either need to ramp down the rhetoric to match the action, or ramp up the action to match the rhetoric. I know which makes more sense to me. How about you?
Labels: Activism, Park, Tacoma
