Your situation reminds me of the song lyric "paved paradise and put up a parking lot"!
Don't get me started...uh oh. When I came here we started a town callled Tortolita, which was crushed by political puppets, the powers that be. We thousands felt our grief, realizing that American democracy was just a myth. We all fought and believed in it, our right to our lifestyle, the right of preservation of a sustainable ecological wonderland to exist. We fought hard and spent fortunes, for years defending out rights and freedoms. Things became more stoic after that. It WAS crushing. Now, there is a new parking lot every couple of weeks, big ones, the big corporate kind that kills the local economy, the small business people, the culture and values. It is difficult to fight with outrage and still live the freedom that one fights for. Maybe there's a solution kinda like "A Pict Song" by Rudyard Kipling.
One must recognize and accept the forces of inevitability so as to not live in the illusion. When I walk naked in the moment, there is no illusion. I can't be robbed by the future, or past.
So we wrote songs about our town back in those days to play around the campfires, at fundraisers, sit ins, protests and for our continuously assaulted spirits. One was to the tune of John Prine's "Paradise" near your own neck of the woods.
"And daddy won't you take me back to old Tortolita,
by the Canyon Del Oro, where the box turtles play,
Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in askin',
Don Diamond and his ventures scrapped the whole place away."
Yea, that one goes on with lots of cute lyric.
Then there was the town song with Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville":
We Tortolitans, we love our lifestyle
Our Sonoran Desert, coyotes and owls,
Our Pygmy Owl is a rare bird, and like us it's endangered,
If you blade and scrape it, we're gonna howl.
Chorus:
We made a Town, we called it Tortolita;
Marana won't take one more acre of land
Some people say, they're going to make us go away
But we know, we've drawn our line in the sand.
More lyric:
Our towns been sued by, all of the big guys
They want to control us, but we want to be free,
So we won't surrender, the flag that we tender
Cause our battle cry is "Don't Tread on Me."
Well, there's much more of them. I wrote a popular one about taking down annexation posting signs and daring the police to arrest us all (we had legal right that night) to the tune of "Hey Joe." We had a posse that would take them down with ropes horses, western apparel with the news cameras watching. Sometimes we'd make prisoner trades when the anti democracy local governments would steal our campaign signs during elections. The last one went down with a couple of hundred people gathered around. It looked like Iwo Jima with cowboy hats and pickup trucks. It felt good. The OV Police had to just sit and watch.
We have to deal with a similar decisions when we intend to exercise our body freedom, spirit and defense. Pict song, fight song, arrest song, in your face, quietly go away tail down, etc.
Jbee
