Second Generation

  It's strange when public roads are cordoned off, to see people still using the zebra crossing, checking the  lights and signal and the whole works.  I enjoyed the appropriation of a roadway for the jazz/ blues festival of course, but not so sure how I felt about fencing off the beach..  There was a line of lumi-jacketed security people suggesting that we all leave before 5, but I think like us, a lot of them like us, called the big bluff and wandered around eating hot dogs while everyone else stayed outside the fence...    Seeing a crowd of people waiting outside a barricade while you wander around managing runaway mustard,  leaves one with a strange sense of awkward guilt, I blame the media, (that's the quickest and most efficient thing to blame).  We have so many images of walls and fences, barricading the one from the other, in the news and in our minds, that it could really go down as the era of apartheid, or if you want to steer clear of those connotations, The time of delineation.  But not fixed. You might think that it would be but it's in no way permanent.  Remembering South Africa's apartheid really has an old fashioned longevity of fences and barricades..  but this modern age has delineations that move about.  Everything is happening more quickly, admittedly there's little vascillation in the delinating boundaries of Gaza, more of a shrinking effect in stops and starts.  Part of me there fore can't help but wonder how adamantly I should feel righteous about standing astride a meridian strip in mission bay with the push chair and still wet from togs on under dress (as the changing rooms had been locked earlier to 'help' people leave the beach.  It was for a brief moment (about twenty minutes), a priviledge of the few that I held, but of course without leave of the governing populace...  oh dear, a trickle down effect from the greater delineations of history.  A quick us and them.  But if I hadn't thought of images I hold in my mind , let's see...  a  middle aged woman being beaten behind the lines in Kosovo; a boy snipered crossing the huge divide of the Berlin walls; a journalist getting too close to the wall on the Palestinian side and his fright as shots echo around his camera, the crushing of fans against the fence at a football stadium in England, the throngs of refugees trying to get a handout from UN aid services...    You'll have your own list too.  So if I have these thoughts this knowledge, how far away am I from one of those other fences?  I think about 500 feet.