It’s fine, scatter your half eaten takeout that you ate for dinner around the playground overnight. You are probably used to others picking up your sh.t all your lives. This time, it was me who gathered it up and threw it in trash.
It’s okay, scribble your stupid gang tags on the ground and play equipment. you don’t have the creativity, skills or imagination for anything more than that, but we pay for people whose life work is to erase this. That money would be better spent on planting flowers and fixing broken benches for the old people, or feeding the homeless, but your feeling of self importance matters, too, and so is your right to self expression in our liberal democracy.
Unlike a despised gentrifying immigrant invader like me, you probably played at this playground ten years ago, so it’s yours as much as it is mine now. I would like to imagine that you or your parents gladly contributed taxes to this city (if you were in the high enough bracket to actually be paying taxes), and sent a check to Park Conservancy when you found their envelope in your mailbox. Because, you know, taxes is what buys us all a civilization.
I share the city with you, and sharing the playground with you is a part of it, and it’s a beautiful thing. Having been able to immigrate here, I was more “fortunate” than you who were born in this country with full command of the language and the privileges that it confers on its citizens – you probably didn’t get as many of these privileges as some others. We all contribute to its diversity in our ways.
But when you methodically and deliberately leave your phlegm-filled spit on every slide and every swing – claiming it for your disgusting selves only, that’s where my sympathy for you ends. If you share this city with others, that means you, too, have to share it with those who are smaller, weaker, and less experienced in life than you. Two-year olds are citizens, too.
I was at a loss as to explain to crying L why this morning is not the day to play at the playground. Maybe some of us don’t deserve to live in a liberal democracy after all.
tinfoilparachute 