“Wealth without virtue is no harmless neighbor.” (Sappho, circa 600 B.C., Greece)
We must be able to recognize when we have lost. We must know what we have lost. We must be able to acknowledge it to self and to others. And we must know that some losses are irrevocable.
We must know the difference between sitting down at the negotiating table with something left to negotiate, as opposed to kneeling at the guillotine.
Malibu has already been lost. She has been lost as habitat to wildlife. The ignorant laugh and jeer when monarch butterfly habitat is mentioned. Have they never known a coal miner and a canary? Can they not make a connection?
Loss is one thing. Treachery is another.
The Malibu Bay Company and Mr. Perenchio offer a ball field for Malibu — and Joan House and Tom Hasse do not rise up and stride to the sea to proclaim the outrage?
They call it “an honorable exchange.”
Please let us take honorable defeat. And call it what it is — rape.
And we all stood nobly by — and nodded, “Well, we did our best. You can’t fight the bottom line, money talks, property rights and the little kids need a ball field. Nay, they are “entitled” to a ball field — just like the little kids in Indianapolis. Which is one huge, flat ball field — but without one square foot of ocean.
If you don’t realize what you have — how can you protect it?
Loss of the land, loss of open space, lost of wildlife is irrevocable. Once gone, it can no more be resurrected.
Don’t take blood- money. Don’t deal with the devil. Do not crown their victory with a monument. Remember what we have lost and what we are about to lose. That, and that alone, should make us brave enough to risk saying, “No deal.” “Not one more square foot of further development in Malibu.” “It cannot be sustained.” “There is nothing to negotiate.”
Trish Van Devere Scott