Recently, an informational plaque has been put up near the pond in the middle of the Sutton Trails. It describes how back in the day the pond was called Hospital Lake, and was stocked with fish to feed the mental health hospital.
Hospital Lake was a WPA project. Many of the things we love in the old core of Norman, the amphitheater, the cool-looking drainage system (pictures below), and now I learn Hospital Lake were built during the one time the United States flirted with being a social democracy. On, the other hand, most of the boring places that kids, particularly of privileged backgrounds, are so eager to flee were made by private business. A tragedy of the commons, indeed.
Also, this demonstration of stacking functions -- making a dam for a drainage system, making it into a beautiful "lake" (pond) for the trail system, and then turning it into a source of food production -- seems like a cutting edge idea to our modern ears. But if you look at a lot of WPA projects, they were done with what should be common sense. Here, living after the post World War 2 cultural inflection, a complete cultural suicide, it is only now becoming possible to imagine such things as policy *, and hard to imagine them happening. Just think of the red-tape in getting these different parts of government to work together.
I know that above I seemed to endorse more government spending on public works (I did) and now I am wanting less regulation (in cases like this, with localities, I do), but how does that fit into the left/right dichotomy that is supposed to work for all of our public discourse? Whose side am I on? Short answer: the side of people living well. Longer answer: Mu! We must stop structuring our investigations of the world as an adversarial debate** between two and only two sides. Also, almost any time left/right frame comes up it is more important to address the frame than the answer to the question; that just how harmful the frame is.
I think a lot about the idea of "the once and future" town of Norman, Oklahoma. While to some extent the activities that are invigorating our town, such as murals and the art walk, are copied and pasted from other towns, we can also dig into our past to find precedents for what is now the cutting edge of making a better place to live.
* Assuming I am a representative case. I understand I am a bit of a radical now, but I was raised I quite conventionally, I think, for someone born in 1984, including lots and lots of cable television.
** When I discovered that the etymology of "debate" was to beat down, think of the "bate" as being related to batter as in assault and battery, I was greatly enlightened to how I had wasted my time in the activity.
