The last pool

To: Retort
From: IB

[The text of a letter to the editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet on the threatened closure of the last swimming pool. IB]

The passage last week of the "Public Commons for Everyone" Initiative was an Orwellian assault by the City administration aimed at the down and out in Berkeley.  For the city bureaucracy, in the very same week, to have announced, with contemptuously short notice, the closing of the last public swimming pool for the midwinter holiday season puts them even deeper in Orwell's debt.

It is disspiriting to have to re-open the campaign to save Berkeley's public pools for everyone so soon after the outrageous treatment of Yassir Chadly, the gracious master of the pools, and the recent round of closures. This is an unprecedented dereliction by Berkeley's managers, looking for line items to axe, of the responsibility owed to the health and well-being of its residents, and to the livelihoods and dignity of its employees. Ironically, if the city management was honest about the "bottom line"  – an obscene calculus, to be sure – they would be forced to acknowledge the net benefits of swimming for the city accounts, owing to the alleviated burden on emergency rooms, the fire brigade, social services and so forth. 

If we lived in a community that truly honored the waters, sweet and salt, in city and bay, on which our lives and life together depend, and that obligation is now surely upon us, the closing of the last public pool – a cinderblock apology though it may be for the glory of the hammans of North Africa that were Yassir Chadly's birthright – would be recognized as a grave moment for our city, in the midst of extravagant private waste. Just as the closing of the last public library would mark, and would be recognized by all to mark, the death of Berkeley as a home for those still committed to an ample life in common. 

Yours etc,
Iain Boal
1 xii 2007

Berkeley, California
94708