Throwback Thursday

On April 1, 2012, I wrote this post to address naysayers of the Symphony Woods park plan. Recall that this was the plan before the Inner Arbor Plan. Take a moment to read it, if you haven't before. I went as over the top as I could to paint a picture of folks who couldn't see the forest for the trees, as it were.

This week it is all coming true.

Yes, now life is imitating art in the wackiest of ways and Cy Paumier has announced he and his group will be leading a protest to the current plan in order to build support for his (rejected) plan. It is as though they have taken their strategy from a satirical April Fool's Day post and are carrying it out in dead earnest.

Anyone who tells you that everything was hunky-dory before the introduction of the Inner Arbor plan for Symphony Woods is just plain wrong. Are they fibbing? Is their memory poor? I don't know.

But you need to know the truth. Many of the same people who are fighting the current plan were actively fighting the previous plan. Really, the same people. Jan Clark was refuting protesters in February, 2012.

On Throwback Thursday we like to post photographs from the past. We ooh and ahh over baby pictures, wedding pictures, impossibly beautiful memories of our pasts. But today I want you to look at a different sort of picture.The fight against a community park in Symphony Woods is not a new one. And it has nothing to do with trees or the beauty of nature. It's about control.

It's not a pretty picture. In fact, this fight has brought out some of the ugliest behavior I have seen in Columbia. But sometimes we need to look at those pictures, to remind ourselves that we can do better.

***

A shout-out to Frank Hecker, whose post got the wheels turning in my head this morning.

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