I recently sent a snarky reply to an email thread concerning one of Asheville’s few downtown parks. For those familiar with the city, it was Pritchard, but the particular issues involved can be easily understood without specific knowledge of this city or that park. The fact that I sometimes send snarky replies is not here contested. The following is an elaboration of the objections I voiced in that reply.

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Once upon a time there was a pleasant little park in a lovely little city. Because CLEAN AND TIDY people loved the pleasant little park they had pushed for improvements, including plantings, park benches, and a soothingly splashy water feature.

Generous local residents, seeing that the (long time) previously installed marble chess boards had been placed in unhelpful locations and without useful seating, paid for refurbishment of the marble chess boards, relocation, and installation of chess player seating.

Unfortunately, the lovingly refurbished park attracted people. (SO much better if people just stayed away!) Alarmingly, chess players started playing chess. Lunchers started lunching. Idlers stopped in to idle.

Most unfortunately, many of the people attracted to the refurbished park were PEOPLE NOT LIKE US.

So, naturally, many of the CLEAN AND TIDY people who had pushed for the park refurbishment, and many who had actually helped with the refurbishment, and some who had actually helped maintain the refurbished park through litter picking and plant plantings ... many of these felt affronted that PEOPLE NOT LIKE US were frequenting the park.

Even more unfortunately, some of the very poor PEOPLE NOT LIKE US were asking CLEAN AND TIDY people for money. That is, they were panhandling. While panhandling is protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it is, as many CLEAN AND TIDY folks are quick to note, unseemly.

Nor was this reaction, nor this attitude, confined to this particular park.

PEOPLE NOT LIKE US were seen to be congregating around park benches situated hither and thither in the lovely little city. Particularly, it must be noted, they were congregating around park benches situated in the shade. And also, to be completely clear, congregating around a particular park bench situated in close proximity to the lovely little city’s central public library. 

(Here it must be noted that with the collapse of the NC mental health care system, lately abetted by the Republican Party, but, in all fairness, initiated under the previous Democratic administrations, county jails and public libraries have become the institutions of last resort for those sad souls who have “slipped through the cracks” as our modern euphemism terms those collaterally damaged by general societal failure. At least in the public libraries the PEOPLE NOT LIKE US can come and go and use computers, perhaps doze in the periodical section, benefits not provided in lock-up.)

The lovely little city promptly removed the park bench adjacent to the library, which cheered the CLEAN AND TIDY crowd no end. 

Soon a bench some blocks away, in a shady place, which sported a brass sculpture of fruit and a hat (meant to commemorate an era when people ate fruit and wore hats), was cut in half — purportedly to enhance its historicity, though, perhaps unintentionally, limiting the seating capacity for PEOPLE NOT LIKE US. The bench was reduced so much that it became more a pedestal for the art installation than functioning bench, which uplifted the CLEAN AND TIDY crowd immeasurably.

During those years a substantial majority of voters in the pleasant little city indicated that they would love nothing more than to create another pleasant little park adjacent to the city’s reigning architectural landmark—a magnificent church. In public opinion polls and in active demonstrations, even letter writing and petitioning, the people made clear that they wanted to see the city’s surface parking lot converted to a lush and lovely park.

Sadly, the CLEAN AND TIDY people convinced a majority of City Council members that the proposed park was unaffordable, would be a burden rather than a boon to the city tax base, and most significantly (though merely whispered) that it was bound to attract PEOPLE NOT LIKE US in unseemly numbers.

And so the elected officials ignored the people who elected them, again and again and again.

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Cecil Bothwell, author of nine books, including “She Walks On Water: A novel” (Brave Ulysses Books, 2013), is a member of Asheville City Council.