re: counting on the city of sacramento

Been re­al­ly mar­i­nat­ing on this con­ver­sa­tion I had last week­end about per­son­al de­vel­op­ment as an an­swer to the City up­hold­ing harm­ful prac­tices and not sup­port­ing artists, and all the sud­den it fits out­side of just the artist nar­ra­tive in Sacramento. 

So if I un­der­stand cor­rect­ly, there was $6 mil­lion dol­lars worth of va­can­cies in the Sac PD that could have eas­i­ly been al­lo­cat­ed to men­tal health, do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, and com­mu­ni­ty well­ness pro­grams at the City bud­get meeting. 

Only three of our coun­cilpeo­ple vot­ed to use that mon­ey to do some­thing pro­duc­tive with it rather than give it to the Po­lice De­part­ment even though they’ve stat­ed mat­ter-of-fact­ly that they have no in­ten­tion of fill­ing those vacancies.

I looked up the new Put-an-Artist-to-Work-in-City-De­part­ments pro­gram that the City is tout­ing as sup­port for artists and it re­quires for­mal col­lege ed­u­ca­tion which elim­i­nates most of the artists I know, es­pe­cial­ly the ones from un­der­served and un­der­re­sourced com­mu­ni­ties, many of whom would be per­fect can­di­dates for the pro­gram, but in­stead artists who had op­por­tu­ni­ties will have more, while those who didn’t won’t.

At this point it’s our own fault if we fail to ac­knowl­edge that THEY will con­tin­u­ous­ly do this. 

The sys­tem is rigged and work­ing perfectly. 

The City (note the cap­i­tal C) isn’t go­ing to ac­tu­al­ly chal­lenge the sta­tus quo or vote in pro­gres­sive, in­no­v­a­tive ways any­time soon (shoutout to the three that did). 

That re­quires heart and con­vic­tion. The ma­jor­i­ty with­in the City sys­tem don’t have it, and those that do lack numbers. 

So the ques­tion then becomes . . . 

What are WE do­ing to keep us safe and sup­port­ed?

What are WE as artists do­ing to en­sure we are val­ued and paid fairly? 

How can WE sup­port US when/because the City re­fus­es to?

 

—an­dru defeye

Flom­mist An­dru De­f­eye is the Guer­ril­la Poet Lau­re­ate of Sacra­men­to. Copy­right © 2023 An­dru Defeye.

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