Just Beautiful!

The city of Long Beach has spent some money in an attempt at beautification of the downtown/Pine Avenue area. There are now large blue barrier walls with design cut-outs surrounding the planters at several street corners.

It all seems a bit strange. Most gardeners will say that plants grow better when they get adequate sunlight, but these walls are barriers to sunlight, not to mention any view of what's growing in the planters. So what's the point?

City scapes are filled with so-called "design elements" with a purpose that often goes unnoticed except by those most-marginalized: those fancy jagged design pieces on ledges and sills in cities across the country are more than "gingerbread," they are there to keep people from staying too long. After all, what could take away from a city's ascetic beauty more than those ugly homeless people. We'd rather hide our lack of compassion and unwillingness/inability to help those in need: never show your ugly side.

Seems to me these little blue walls in Long Beach are yet another attempt to keep the homeless and those with mental illness out of sight...and out of mind.

It won't work, of course...because people don't just disappear. Pushing them away to create an illusion that all is right with the world (at least in downtown Long Beach) is naive and cruel.