Community Commentary - JAMES BRACKETT

I have to agree that Glendale should not cater to the homeless, nor

cater to the homeowners associations, the auto dealers, the developers,

tourists from Iowa, Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

Sometimes I get the notion that too many good burghers can’t seem to

distinguish between catering and simple human values and the

responsibilities attendant to not being in the dire straits that afflict

far, far too many people in this country.

Councilman Gomez was 110% correct in his saying that the council has a

responsibility to everyone in Glendale -- because that is the very raison

d’etre of having city councils and electing people to sit on them.

No, sheltering the homeless is not a business we should be in. There’s

no profit to it and as profit is what drives an apparent majority,

foisting off the homeless and the shelter problem on some other city

would seem to be what the strident voices of Glendale most desire.

Then of course Glendale would have to erect a wall around the city to

be sure that the exported problem is not revisited upon the city. I would

think that the stuff used in the wall around Staples Center could be

bought at a discount to put up around Glendale, buy up the unused stock

of rubber bullets, beanbag projectiles, tear gas, etc, left over from the

recent DNC, and hire Dick Riordan and Bernie Parks to advise the Glendale

Police Department how best to repel boarders at the Great Wall of

Glendale to keep out the homeless and anyone else unacceptable to

Glendale’s good residents. While we are at it, dig a moat around the

Great Wall of Glendale and stock it with underfed piranhas.

Yeah, the citizens of the present and of the past have indeed worked

hard and long to make Glendale what it is today. Unfortunately, that

seems to be the real problem -- it is what it is today -- a collection of

good burghers who would just as soon have their very own planet made as

utterly antiseptic as possible to make of it. OK, fine, how about having

Glendale secede from the United States and hire unemployed Russians and

fellows from the Taliban to be the border guards for the island Grand

Dutchy of Glendale to deal with whomever getting across the moat and over

the Great Wall. Print our own money and postage stamps and sell some of

it to collectors surfing the Internet.

As it is the city promotes lots of stuff -- but it still does not bear

fruit in clean streets, attractive parks and libraries, etc. as the

constant bottom line in Glendale is everybody wants everything, but

nobody wants to pay for it. Of course plenty of tourists will come see

that moat and the Great Wall and we can fleece the tourists before

chasing them out of town before sundown every night.

By the way, has somebody come up with a money-making scheme for the

relic of a National Guard armory yet? I would imagine some cabal of out

of town investors would love to be gifted the land to build some new

monstrosity of architecture on that land that can sit half-vacant for

several years producing no tax revenue for the city and keep real estate

boffins employed flogging it from speculative buyer to speculative buyer

in perpetuity.

Shucks -- the only dire consequences in not devising a winter weather

homeless shelter would be a cold, dead homeless body or two and we

collect the bones, grind them up into bone meal, and fertilize gardens

around town with it just as did enterprising English businessmen after

the Crimean War who dug up the English and Russian bones to make bone

meal to fertilize a whole lot of gardens around Victorian England.

OK, OK, -- I am being damnably facetious and insulting again with the

forgoing -- but I could just not resist the fat balloons of boneheaded

verbiage bruited around for so long now on the perplexing problem of the

shelter problem.

I really don’t like writing fool letters to the editor of the

News-Press or for that matter any newspaper or magazine anywhere in the

world -- but -- some of the nonsense surfacing on the Community Forum

page shrieks for response. The hell of it all is that there just not

enough nonsense detectors writing stuff and sending it to the paper.

Anybody I have not offended yet? Hold up your hand.

JAMES BRACKETT

Glendale