A teaching story

To many, it looked like the struggle to save the world’s largest urban garden -the South Central Farm in Los Angeles – was defeated, a dream buried beneath the treads of the bulldozers that plowed the Farm under following the brutal invasion of an army of L.A. County Sheriffs that crushed the resistor’s encampment, turning the land from a liberated zone into an oppressive, occupied one. But now, two years later, all that could change. Here’s why, and how you can help make it change.

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The place is this one: The South Central Farm. More than any struggle in the history of this city, the forbidden ones, those with no face, no history, no role in the formal or informal myths that comprise the “image” that is Los Angeles, simple farmers and gardeners – campesinos, the indigenous and their descendants – broke through all barriers, uniting people from every racial and cultural group, and every strata and class in a deeply felt unity that spoke to the world entire. They never backed down, although, to all appearances, they went down along with the fences, trees and plants that were bulldozed when the land was seized by an army of Los Angeles Sheriffs. Even then one of the first bulldozers was stopped cold by the resistors who had liberated and occupied the land during a drawn out siege. Imagine. A bulldozer. Stopped. Cold. By a zucchini!

A zucchini sent down its exhaust pipe. No one could have made it up. No one would have believed it.

Just like no one might have imagined that the Farm could be reborn. Given the stranglehold of the myth of private property that has weighed on the land like an invading and occupying army for two years now, since the Farm was seized by the state on behalf of its alleged “owner” – developer Ralph Horowitz – it has seemed impossible that the stranglehold might be broken.

But, as luck would have it, there is a zucchini at hand. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck. Sometimes luck, and just a little imagination applied just so. Sometimes Karma catches up with the bad guys. Just so. That’s how it is this time. And so, there is hope where it seemed all hope had been slain or carried, deeply wounded, from the field.

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