In defense of parks


I like parks, and I use them. Nowadays I usually use city parks, but I like all parks, including national ones, as I'm a firm believer that they're good for people. Theodore Roosevelt would have agreed with me, as president he created a lot of National Parks! Of course, he was wealthy, and his point of view was very different from people who weren't.

It's Wednesday, June 16th, 2021, and I'm seeing the process of people being removed from parks here in Peoria, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. It's been a horrific time for the past year or so, and America hasn't seen this kind of thing since the Great Depression, when people were thrown out of work, lost their homes, and had to just find a place to be, including in parks. And it's shown me just how much of a luxury parks are.

I just watched a Laurel and Hardy short from the 1930s, and they were showing what victims of the Depression had to do. They were camping out somewhere (next to a "No Trespassing" sign, which was supposed to be funny). When they ran out of food, they simply went, as Oliver said, begging for food. And since it was during the Depression, the first house they visited gave them a nice meal. There were a lot of people like that at the time, through no fault of their own, forced to live in tents, and where they could.

But it wasn't long after that that these people were cleared out of places where they had squatted (to use the common term). Some just moved on, but many had to be evicted with force, and park rangers kept an eye out for them if they wanted to live in a park again. Times had changed.

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