Keeping It Separate

Tonight when I went down to run at the track at school there was a woman and a security guy in a uniform sitting behind a table blocking the entrance to the field. I had to sign in to go in. I asked her about it and she said in a closed mouth kind of way that they had had security problems. I was trying to figure out if that meant someone had hurt people or if someone had hurt property. She finally admitted that there had been some theft (what can you steal from a track? garbage cans?) and also concern with students being able to have enough room for their games on the field. Usually the field is super busy with pick up games of soccer and tons of people making their way around the track in various forms and speeds. A lot of the people using the track were not students but people from the surrounding neighbourhood playing with their friends or walking with their kids. It was crowded at times (and some people displayed some very poor track ettiquette) but in a cheerful way. Little kids jumping on the high jump mats, big fat moms walking another lap, teenagers getting some of that testosterone out on the soccer pitch. It felt like a big, safe, well-lit community park.

I don't know if the sign-in thing is meant to shut out people who aren't students. I think it probably is. Tonight, except for some teeny tiny little kids learning how to pass the baton from their coach, it seemed to be all students and it was pretty empty. USC has all these ways that it tries to help people from the immediate neighbourhood: scholarships, magnet schools, etc. I think there's got to be a lot of problems involved with having a very big and very wealthy school taking up a big swath of your community and creeping outwards every day. I hate the idea that the neighbourhood people got kicked out because, more or less, they were making too much use of the space.

Once at UBC I saw a woman chase this tiny old lady with a big bag of pop cans out of the Student Union Building. The can collector people at UBC were almost always older asian people who were very quiet and circumspect. They never seemed to be after anything but cans. So this woman chases away the can lady, who finally abandons her bag of cans and flees. And then the woman grabs the bag of cans and marches back inside the building. What? They're still gonna get recycled! Just let the can lady have them--she worked hard for them. And at the very least, the can people on campus show the students what being industrious looks like.