I’m watching Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s 2008 documentary “The Garden,” a film about urban farmers in South Central Los Angeles and their fight against developers.
For 14 years, 350 familes grew their own food on this 14 acres, once scorched by riots and pain. It was the largest community garden in the U.S.
A flood of words get jammed in my fingers when I try to express how I feel about this. Did I mention that most of these farmers are Latinos and Latinas from the community? Are you surprised?
What I can manage to stammer is that this is the mark of everything wrong about the United States, about our dominator society. This is a prime example of what will destroy our national soul.
In the movie, there is footage of heavily armed police officers storming through tall rows of vegetables. If it were fiction, it would be hilarious. But it’s real, and it’s powerful and embarrassing.
The footage of carefully tended, productive, green vegetables, fruits, herbs, being torn up to put in concrete buildings just wrecks me. I feel that loss viscerally, and it makes me hungry for the social upending that will bring in a nurturing, partnership society. Right NOW.
Did you ever think that you were wasting your time in high school? That it wasn’t the best place for you to spend seven hours a day, five days a week? If you had determined this and you had failing grades to prove that you and high school were not a good fit, would your parents have let you stay home and watch movies all day?
David Gilmour’s book, The Film Club: A Memoir, came out last summer, but when I heard him read some of the final chapter on NPR yesterday, he had me near tears. And no, it wasn’t preggy hormones. Even Douglas McGrath, in his New York Times Book Review, said that the book moved him to tears… more than once.