”
It’s so ugly,
”
moans my daughter Anne whenever we drive by the construction
site of the new police station.
“It’s so ugly,” moans my daughter Anne whenever we drive by the construction site of the new police station.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, about last March, I used to disagree with her. “Just wait,” I used to say. “The architectural drawings are really pretty. It’s going to be a Spanish mission effect, with a clock tower. Don’t worry.”
Now I say nothing, because the closer to completion the building gets, the uglier it gets. The huge gray cinderblock structure looming behind the construction site fence bears only a faint resemblance to the pleasant pseudo-mission we were expecting to see.
True, it has the promised clock tower, creamy walls, an attractive roof and wide stairs. But all that is barely visible, as it is encircled by a hideous cinderblock curtain wall. It looks like a prison or a fortress.
Our young neighbor Horacio asked me what it was, and looked incredulous when I told him it was the new police station.
“It’s a jail, no?” he asked.
“No,” I said, trying to be simultaneously truthful and supportive of our public institutions in the presence of a young person. “It’s our new police station. It may have a couple of holding cells, but it is not a jail.”
I do not think he believed me.
I have stopped calling it the Taj Mahal. Now in my private thoughts, I call it the Bastille, after what I imagine the infamous Parisian prison, bastion of tyranny, to be like. (I do not know what the real Bastille looked like, because the French had enough sense to tear down their Bastille.)
The ugliness offends Anne; the encircling curtain wall concerns my in-house political advisor. “I wish they wouldn’t use military construction on a police station,” he says. “Who do they think they have to defend against? The Huns?”
“Perhaps they are preparing for Assault on Precinct 13,” I suggested. He was not amused.
Minor issues also bother me. How are Americans with Disabilities supposed to get up those steps? Or does the ADA not apply to police stations?
What is the new price tag? Replacing every moldy panel was $100,000; the roof snafu was $100,000, new furniture was budgeted at $300,000; new computers were supposed to be $70,000, but that was before the computers in the police cars turned out to be unreliable … Are we still talking $26.3 million? Or did we have a quiet increase, to be shouldered, one way or another, by the taxpayers?
But as it nears completion, that initially unbelievable price tag of $26 million makes more sense. Castles ain’t cheap.
n n n
I read with interest the AP story in The Dispatch on Thursday, Sept. 14 “Contrasts Amid Voters, Non-Voters.” The story says that only 69 percent of the eligible population bothers to register to vote. Only 35 percent of the eligible population votes frequently.
Frequent voters tend to be whiter, better educated, older, and richer (household incomes of at least $60,000) than the population at large.
Not surprisingly, there are sharp differences in political voting patterns between the two groups. “Two-thirds of nonvoters support higher taxes and more government services,” compared to only 49 percent of frequent voters.
The story quoted a Mark Baldassare, research director for the Public Policy Institute of California, who thinks that this situation bodes ill for democracy.
Come again? Why is it a problem if better educated people make the political decisions? What is the problem with having people who are responsible enough to support themselves and their families make the decisions about taxes?
Mind you, there is no minimum education requirement, nor any minimum bank balance required to vote. In order to vote, a person has to be at least 18, not a felon, and motivated enough to fill out a little card and show up at the polls a couple of times a year. In short, a person has to care.
The Public Policy Institute thinks that we should undertake voter registration drives among underrepresented groups, make it easier for immigrants to become citizens, and allow people to register and vote on Election Day. But how will a poorer, more ignorant and more easily swayed electorate benefit democracy?
