At the council meeting,
I saw people biting each others necks,
In this old Republican town of Chapman,
This town of 1920s Klan,
And citrus towns,
And strikes in the 30s,
The Citrus War,
And the 60s Rumford Fair Housing Act
That most people hated,
Except this guy Ralph Kennedy
Spoke his mind and got
Arrested with Cesar Chavez,
And then those crazy concerts
At Hillcrest in the 60s and 70s,
When John Schmitz was our
Representative,
He of the John Birch Society,
And then John Briggs,
Who proposed that gay teachers should
Be fired, and debated Harvey Milk,
And then the apathy of the 80s
And the punks like the Adolescents
And The Middle Class who hated that,
And then the changes of the 90s,
Restoring the Plummer mural,
Covered for nearly 60
Years because it was “too Mexican”
And then Ed Royce,
He of the Republican Establishment,
And then the reign of Bankhead,
(what a perfect name for a politician),
and then, and then Sharon Quirk-Silva
got elected, the first Latina council member
in a town that, for many years, segregated
its latinos, and still kind of unofficially does,
with those railroad tracks and
all they represent.
And then that guy Tony Bushala,
Wealthy inheritor/blogger
And his libertarian ideas,
And now here we are
And everyone is biting each
Others necks,
But I guess we’ve come a ways
And have a long ways to go.
At least we don’t have citrus towns any more,
In The Town I Live In.
