Friday, 20 May 2022
Port of Ilwaco
We weeded the port gardens from CoHo Charters to the west end, skipping the east bed because we did not have time for all, and because wasn’t too awfully bad. While I was checking on the east end to see if we could get away with skipping it, we saw one motor home that was not mobile on its own being towed from the Beacon RV Park (which taxsifter calls a mobile home park). I heard later that this had been the home of the former park manager who has died.
Allan looked at the escallonia hedge at at CoHo and I had a revelation that someone else has to take on that job. We are too old to do everything, we (or at least I) don’t want to quit one of our big public jobs (the port or Long Beach), so some little jobs just have to go. It makes life less stressful to not have to fit in little occasional jobs like the hedge pruning. CoHo owner Butch was nice about it. We weeded around his block wall as a farewell gift.
Musings about society’s “elite”
Something I saw on Facebook early in the day got me all riled but I don’t have time to write as much as I’d like to about it except to say that to describe the rich as the “elite”, the VIPs, and the “rocks stars” for being able to afford a one thousand dollar fancy garden dinner irks me. (Butch always tells us we are rock stars for pruning his hedge and doing the port gardens so well, but that’s not the same.) While watching people being evicted at the end of the block, I had no patience for this high opinion of how special the wealthy are, in this county with a huge poverty and housing problem. A retired Oysterville teacher, writer and historian had time to write a full length blog post about it which you can read here, including responses by readers who cannot seem to understand that the issue is just about the one thousand dollar ticket holders being described as “elite” “rock star” “VIPs” on a page that the common people look to for garden tour news. It is NOT about the garden tour that took place the next day (although I do know people who felt excluded from that because of the $50 ticket price, which is exceptionally high for a garden tour in my experience.) All I have time for is this incoherent rant about classism, snobbery, and intolerable hoity-toity-ism. Fundraising is fine and dandy but I do wish the moneyed didn’t get described as better than people who don’t even dream (as they probably work three jobs to survive) of such splendor. It is especially inappropriate to do so publicly in a small community. I spent the afternoon in a state of disgust which was soothed when I saw on local Facebook that many local people were also appalled…even ones with money who could have afforded to be one of the “elite” had they wanted to.
It looks to me simply unseemly to boast in public of how elite are the folks with $1k to spare. The garden tour was founded by our dear friend Patti and was for the people and supposed to be kept affordable. Not a “society page” event.
What a contrast it made to the poor run down trailer park at the end of the block where people are trying to figure out where to go.
Tangly Cottage Gardening 
Coincidentally, I am in the middle of reading the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, a novel by Eva Jurczyk. The library (and the affiliated university) rely on the largesse of well heeled donors, in order to buy rare first editions and ancient tomes. To this end, the VIP donors are feted at cocktail parties with champagne and fancy canapes, with much massaging of egos.
Library staff hold them in disdain. “The air stank of wine and self importance, the thousand dollar suits, the collections of letters that followed every name, the important men…”
The not so subtle subtext is, that this is what it takes to attract big money donors. But it is a hard pill to swallow, seeing this play out at local community events. Especially juxtaposed with area residents made homeless down the road. And especially at events that once had more egalitarian access.
I don’t know what the solution is, because the taste of Big Money is hard for event organizers to pass up. But it is bitter on the tongue of those relegated to the non VIP tour, even though any charitable donation, be it $1000 or $50, or what you can afford, should make rock stars of everyone.
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A local woman who is experienced in fancy fundraising posted this on: “I think this post is mostly about the $1000 a plate dinner that by its very nature is an elite event. Twenty+ years ago when I was organizing and attending such events we had organizing committees. Those “rock stars” put their names on the event and both bought and sold the tickets. Perhaps Water Music’s mistake was to use social media instead of proper invitations to such a dinner. One never asks someone else to support an event that they themselves will not support.”
That was the problem, not the fundraiser that raised needed money, but the boasting on public social media about how much better than us the rich are. When I posted the event photo on my private friends only timeline, over 60 comments ensued, all appalled. It had nothing to do with the garden tour, although the $50 ticket is also upsetting to the originator of this once for the people affordable tour. The excuse was lack of parking in the small town of O’ville. Their regular tour in July will be back to the lower ticket price.
I LOVE that quotation.
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My favorite comment set in private said the post was “either gormless or malicious”. I think the former.
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….malicious is a strong word. Smug, boastful, conceited or wannabe elite are perhaps more on point.
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I saw this post and it bothered me, too. I really wanted to tour the gardens as they look so beautiful from the street, but I didn’t feel I wanted to spend even $50 to do so. What is the bright orange-red flower (not the California poppies) in the beds at the port? Very pretty!
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It might be a helianthemum…down by the restrooms and David Jensen’s office. If it is low growing.
My dear friend Patti is so annoyed by what has happened to the garden tour that she created “for the people” that she is thinking of a letter to the editor, also re the Water Music Festival, the event associated with the garden tour, of which she was President for awhile, and whose mission was to be affordable and to offer two free concerts as part of the event, and now it’s a fancy snacks and wine event that cost a pretty penny and has no free concerts.
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Ilwaco, like all of the USA, has a dire affordable housing crisis. Coastal communities have been especially hard hit, as homes are bought up for vacation homes and rentals, or replaced with large, expensive homes.
The gap between the “haves’, a small percent of the population, and the “have nots” (the rest of us), is widening.
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It is and is a constant concern of mine. I attend many meetings on zoom…not worried for me so much as for many others.
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Research tends to show that unequal societies are unhappy societies. There are solutions but the more unequal the society is, the less acceptable possible solutions are.
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Wise and true. Not very many years ago, Long Beach (WA) was the top town in Washington State for the divide between rich and poor and Ocean Park was the fourth. It was said that the rich were behind gates (or private roads) in mansions by the beach and bay and the poor lived in single wides or shacks in the middle and often worked in the service industry (restaurants, hotels, shops) or in fishing cleaning and oyster picking. Now the service workers can’t even afford a shack.
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It is distressing.
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Reading about this event makes me SO angry because at the moment I am dealing with a bully elitist neighbor who will only hang out with the upper crust.
Her husband worked for a well-known oil company for 40+ years before he retired. She makes it appear that she cares about the community, but the truth is she just wants to look good.–She will put her name on a volunteer committee and then doesn’t volunteer, but her name gets in the newspaper. She joins community organizations then doesn’t go to their events/meetings, but she makes certain to mention she is a member in various articles about her. She and her husband like to drop names.
I once said to her, “When you die, people remember you more for how you treated them than the stuff you owned (fancy car, house, etc.).” She said she disagreed. I could go on. I won’t.
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She thinks people will remember what she owned, eh? Well, bless her heart, if she could see from beyond the grave, she would find she is mistaken.
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Oh, I should not have stopped. I know that the particular home was no longer needed, but it is saddening to see anyway. What is worse is that it is not here, where we expect the destruction of our formerly idyllic culture, but in Ilwaco, where people should be able to live as they can or want to.
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Thank you for your caring heart.
>
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A comment to the hostile person who tried to post. You bombarded me with emails saying my blog was boring, puerile (misspelled) and self-serving. Your comments here go into spam and I do not read them. I don’t understand why you still even look at this blog since you dislike it and me so much. It is baffling. You must have read to the end. Strange.
Whatever your complaint was, it is still inappropriate and hurtful for wealthy folks to be described as being elite in a public setting read by many local people.
You are wasting your typing fingers ever trying to comment here.
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