All of us need a toilet and most of us use one many times a day. It is the most basic need we have, besides the need to drink water and eat food. As a matter fact, eating and drinking directly results in our need to use the toilet.
A few years ago a group of powerful individuals imposed Joyce Wilson upon the community to take the city’s residents kicking and screaming into the next phase of the utopian paradise they want to make out of El Paso. The first phase was the baseball stadium and the demolition of city hall. The problem with this utopian revitalization is that it is being designed for the specific use of the elite ignoring the rest of the community that have been delegated as nothing more than wallets to fund the utopian dream.
Anyone opposed to the drive towards the utopian paradise is labelled a “crazy,” marginalized and sometimes driven from the city. Those that support the utopian public agenda, like the El Paso Times, are given a carrot, or two to keep them happily proclaiming the “vision” that is reinventing the city.
The carrots have helped the utopian drivers keep the rabble-rousers in check and the truth hidden behind the cloak of the “promise” of the wonderfulness that is just around the corner. Simple things like a toilet that is an impediment to the “vision” for the promised utopia is conveniently ignored by the powerful and their enablers.
Much money and “vision” has been spent on the San Jacinto Plaza. Ethnicity and cultural identity has been superficially touted in the design and the inclusion of ethnic-based iconography such as the Huacha courts while conveniently ignoring the most basic of human needs – a toilet. What many are missing is that the ethnic icons are not a celebration but will be a reminder of what once was.
The lack of toilets at San Jacinto Plaza clearly betrays the true reason behind the revitalization of El Paso. It shows that the “raza” and the riffraff have no place in the promised utopia that is being built to replace El Paso. Apologists like the El Paso Times’ Joe Muench are quick to defend the nixing of bathrooms for the park because that is what they are paid to do. You see, the horde is intent on reinventing El Paso and there is no place for you. The horde understands that distracting the citizenry paying for their utopia is the best the way to keep them happy with table scraps occasionally thrown at them but the end result is to get rid of you as there is no place for you in their utopia for old El Paso.
City council has had numerous opportunities to address the lack of toilets at San Jacinto Plaza. Each time the discussion has moved away from this very basic need into discussing portable toilets to making businesses make their toilets available to everyone. In other words, it is not about solving a very basic need but rather keeping everyone distracted while the displacement of the undesirables is accomplished. The most insidious part of the development of the utopia for the elite is that they have successfully kept you paying the bills while at the same time ensuring you have no place in the paradise they are building for themselves, with your money.
Many of you think that you won the war against the destruction of the fabric that makes El Paso when Segundo Barrio was saved from the wrecking ball, when in reality; the horde regrouped, learned their lesson and has successfully and systematically been erasing the ethnicity that made El Paso unique.
The Huacha courts at San Jacinto aren’t about embracing the culture of El Paso, they are, instead, museum curiosities that future generations will point to and ask their parents what are those things. The parents will gleefully proclaim, they remind us of the savages that once occupied these lands that thankfully are no longer here. They will then scurry their brood along so that they can gawk at the statues of the saviors of the New El Paso – Foster & Hunt.