“Knowledge and Time”
by Roberto Juarez
I know today
What I did not know yesterday,
And tomorrow
I will know even more.
That my todays are short
And my tomorrows seem so far away,
And that my yesterdays
Determine
What kind of tomorrows I will have.
One thing that I have noticed over the years is that retired cops sometimes are more passive than expected. While they are on the force, they wear the badge, the gun, and the uniform. These items go a long way in terms of giving the officer authority and setting up the relationship. For some cops, they have to push their normal personality to match the “authority figure” and “in control” image they need to do the job.
Some retired cops are glad to be away from the badge and gun. Their personality swings to the opposite side, becoming more passive than expected.
The website The Heavy Badge touches on some of these points in “10 Reasons Law Enforcement Officers are Different.”
April is National Poetry Month
Excerpt from “Anonymous Is Coyote Girl” (2000)
By Anita Endrezze
Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins,
lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas.
Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños
from East L.A., driving their low-riders,
chrome shinier than a cop’s badge.
And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed
girl with a punch like a bag of bees,
a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open
as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out
of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla?
Here is a link to the full poem at the Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238976
There is a good quote that deals with courage in the face of personal honor.
“That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
–Cormac McCarthy, “All the Pretty Horses”
My father always stressed the need for responsibility for one’s actions. If you mess you, you take responsibility and face the consequences.
So many people that I know have taken the easy way out.
One of the many challenges facing urban communities is well-equipped parks for children. A step in the right direction was taken recently at Evergreen Park in Boyle Heights. The project was a collaboration between the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, Councilman José Huizar, First 5 LA and the Los Angeles Neighborhoods Initiative (LANI).
From the First 5 LA website:
First 5 LA has also invested nearly $10 million in “Tot Parks and Trails” to develop 36 new tot parks and trails and improve existing parks to make them safe for children under the age of 5. The latest tot park – at Evergreen Recreation Center – broke ground on Feb. 21.
From Eastern Group Publications website:
Thirteen thousand children under the age of 5 who live within two miles of the Evergreen Recreation Center in Boyle Heights will soon have access to new play equipment; equipment which a coalition of city officials and local organizations say they hope will help them stay active and decrease the number of children who are obese or overweight.
Links to the news articles
First 5 LA: http://www.first5la.org/articles/bloom-in-a-green-space-desert
Eastern Group Publications: http://egpnews.com/2013/02/evergreen-park-to-get-play-fitness-upgrades/
Here is the link to some photos taken during my interview by producer Nicholas Damien, for upcoming Marc Levin documentary to be released winter of 2013
