AJ MCCLEOD
This has been a year like no other and those of us fortunate of reading this have made it through it no matter the struggles we have faced.
Many families lost loved ones and went through tremendous hurt and pain as we faced circumstances that our country had been fortunate not to have had to face before. As we leave 2020 I think of two words that have stuck with me from a conversation that sparked from the question, “What would keep children out of the juvenile justice system?” The simple but very complex answer: “Opportunity and Access.
Opportunity as defined by Oxford is “a set of circumstances that make it possible to do something” while access in its verb form is to “obtain, examine, or retrieve”. As I thought about this answer I thought about the opportunities I have been given and how I gained access to these things, while others from my neighborhood hadn’t.
meeting on friday, let s find out what our families think about the hospital and what they think about this plan. i did a survey of the 26 folks that were there and this is the outcome because i don t know if this helps. of the 26 there, 20 live in the tenderloin, four live along the franklin corridor which is on the other side. and 88% of the respondents that i talked to had either meddical or healthy kids so for me it s disconcerting to see the build of a hospital where 88% might not have access to it. they go to community clinics. when i asked what kind of hospital they d like to see in the neighborhood, most said that hospital that serves needs of children, emergency services and dental services. the other thing is the traffic and contamination issue. before you ve seen a million and one pedestrian reports in the tenderloin. it is one of the most dangerous areas to walk through and the highest density of children so for us it s disconcerting to see we ll have 10,000, 2,00
there are some workers somewhere that support this project. and but sciu hasn t managed to come up with the presentations like the nurses just did. they just have a few of the top leaders saying, we support this, you know, but not a whole line of people. so i want to tell you what happened to me. i was told there was a party across the hall and that they would be serving punch and there would be a raffle, a drawing, and there would be cakeuned ice cream and everything so i took a break and went over and they asked us to sign up for the raffle so i signed up for the raffle. guess what, i didn t look closely. there were a whole bunch of people signing up for this party the fine print said, when you sign up for this, that you re signing that you support this project. so, in other words, they re using all kinds of sneaky methods to try to pretend like they have workers supporting the project. but people who work at st. luke s don t support it because they can see they re being do