Activist. The word activist encompasses so many different kinds. You’ve got civil rights activists, abortion activists, women’s rights activists, Democratic activists, Republican activists, LGBT activists, animal rights activists, gun activists and many more. But I bet you didn’t think that we have a garden activist running for the Madison City Council.
What’s a garden activist, you ask?
Well, I’ve never met one, but I can tell you that I received a flyer from Sarah King, candidate for District 13 Alderperson, and it says that she founded Kids Garden in Madison. Her flyer states that, “Kids Garden gets kids in touch with the soil and growing things …” I’m not sure what getting in touch with the soil and growing things means, but I know that I stepped outside yesterday and touched the dirt with my shoes because all of the melting ice had washed some of the brown stuff on our sidewalk. Does that count? And as far as getting in touch with growing things, the milk spoiled in my apartment and there was some nasty mold growing in it. I must admit that I didn’t actually touch the mold per se. It sort of just mixed together with the hot water as I was cleaning the carton out in the sink.
In a recent Capital Times article about Sarah King, I learned of one more of her outstanding credentials to qualify her as a candidate for the City Council. King says she, “learned patience from gardening and quilt-making.” She took a year after college to study quilt-making in Tonga and the Cook Islands. She goes on to say that the sort of patience that gardening demands is “useful in certain situations.”
I still can’t figure out whether Ms. King’s visions for the City of Madison are to turn the golf courses into excessively large tomato farms or institute quilt-making classes as a mandatory part of secondary education.
Either way, I have to wonder.
Did anyone ever check on the residency requirements of garden activists like Ms. King or bike queens like Robbie Webber? Because I don’t know the specifics, but I do know that you have to have, at the very least, lived on planet earth in order to qualify for candidacy.
The city of Madison is very fortunate to have people like District 7 Alderman Zach Brandon and District 5 challenger Ben Moga as civil servants. These two understand that there are much more important and relevant issues to confront other than making sure that we get enough spinach planted in people’s dirt or enough bike trails to make Mayor Dave blush. Brandon and Moga are reasonable Democrats who know what it takes to run a progressive city by instituting sane laws that balance business with big government, fiscal responsibility with fair funding for necessary social programs, and most importantly, that they are representing a city that is a melting pot of ideas, values and cultures. In other words, they aren’t focusing their entire agendas on appealing to a narrow constituency.
Sarah King, who claims to be a garden activist, is essentially doing what the far-right wing Republicans are attempting in “saving” social security by creating private savings accounts. They are pushing their own agenda to benefit the Wall Street investors, while neglecting the sound advice of institutions like the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which says that there is no social security crisis.
Another example of the far-right wingers using their political clout to push for unnecessary, insignificant causes happened recently when the state of Virginia banned gay marriage, and at the same time, snuck a little bill in with it to say that it is now legal to pray in public buildings. Of course, it has always been legal to pray in public buildings anywhere in the United States, but these far-righties only passed it to appease a small populace of the radical Christian right in their districts.
If you’re worried about property taxes, how you’re going to pay your medical bills, fixing problems with our schools, road maintenance, keeping good, small businesses here so we have a strong tax base and making sure that police and fire protection are adequate, then vote in this Tuesday’s election for candidates that make sane choices, like Brandon and Moga. If you’re worried about filling our city parks with rhubarb plants and requiring that all banks install drive-up lanes for bicycles, then I’m not sure what to tell you. But I would probably suggest that you lay off the hookah just a little bit.
Casey Hoff ([email protected]) is a UW student and the host of “New Ground with Casey Hoff,” live Monday through Friday, 9-11 a.m., on Talk Radio 1670 WTDY.
