Editor’s Note: In February, 2012, former San Diego City council person and judge, Larry Stirling wrote a commentary about Chicano Park, the US debt, and the political left, that was published in the San Diego Daily Transcript. After reading this commentary I felt offended by the mischaracterization and the lack of understanding of what Chicano Park was all about.
In subsequent emails with Mr Stirling, he emphasized that “the thrust of the column which is [why] a Federal Grant by a government in massive debt spending money on anti American graffiti. My column is not anti Hispanic, it is anti left.”
While Mr Stirling may not have intended the commentary to be anti-Hispanic, it is difficult to read it any other way, but anti-Hispanic, anti-Chicano. We are republishing the commentary in whole so you the readers can draw your own conclusion.
Two community members have responded to Mr Stirling — Gail Perez and Maria Curry, as did editor Dan Munoz.
Funding La Izquierda
By Larry Stirling
The United States Government has accumulated the largest debt in the entire history of the world.
According to the web site “u.s.debtclock.org” the current 15-trillion dollar obligation exceeds an entire years output of our nation and continues to grow at warp speed.
I would think that even hard-left elected officials like Congressman Bob Filner would object to Federal expenditures other than those essential for the health, safety and well being of Americans, their nominal purpose.
In thinking that, I would be wrong as I learned by a recent visit to San Diego’s “Chicano” park in Congressman Filner’s district.
I am still mystified as to why “Chicano’s” even have their own park. I looked in vain for a Gringo, African-American, Chinese, Vietnamese or other ethnic parks. What possessed a prior city council to buy into such a racist, wholly un-American undertaking is a puzzle.
You can tell where Chicano Park is by the graffiti on the CALTRANS highway access spans leading to and from Coronado Bay Bridge.
Throughout the rest of the state, CALTRANS annually spends millions and risks the lives of their employees removing signs of gangs, political candidates, or scatological body parts.
But not in the “Barrio Logan.”
CALTRANS apparently gave up and declared the bridge stanchions an ethnic graffiti free-fire zone thereby condemning the residents of Barrio Logan to a visual daily barrage of anti-American political propaganda from the American Hispanic hard left: La Izquierda.
But freedom to litter the bridges with graffiti is now apparently not enough.
What La Izquierda needed was one million, six hundred thousand dollars granted to them by the deficit-dollar spending United States government to paint a whole new, updated, and refreshed version of their hard-left propaganda murals.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Mexico. And I like Mexicans.
I have traveled throughout the Estados Unidos de Mejico from the Yucatan to the Pacific. And from the U.S. border to Guatemala.
It is a big, diverse, beautiful country filled with wonderful Christian people.
They make great food, wonderful music, and dances that communicate a happy optimism that counters the grinding poverty imposed by 200 years of communist and socialist governments.
Their poverty has now been augmented with a horrible murder rate that results from their equally pernicious gun-control and no-death-penalty laws.
Thus I have no objection to celebrating things Mexican in the United States. I love Cinco de Mayo in Old Town and Las Posadas at Christmas time.
In my view, Mexico and Canada are the two nations in the world most important to the safety and well being of Americans.
Let some nut case like Hugo Chavez take over Mexico as nearly happened in the last election and we will have Hezbollah rockets launching from the foothills south of our borders.
However, what is being painted on the Coronado Bridge is not a celebration of Mexico or important Mexicans-Americans in the United States.
The murals being added or refreshed are primarily communist propaganda painted with money borrowed on the “full faith and credit” of the American taxpayers.
Those communist murals will be long gone by the time the money spent to paint them is paid back, if ever. In the meantime, our kids will be paying interest on the forgotten murals until the end of time.
And what murals are those?
There are portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Between the two of them, they murdered or imprisoned thousands of Hispanics. Castro offered the Russians a base in Cuba from which to launch nuclear missiles against American cities.
There is a memorial to Salvador Allende repeatedly alleged by the left to have been the “democratically elected” president of Chile ousted by a CIA coupe supposedly to our shame. Pure “hecho para el toro.”
Allende was never elected President of Chile. In fact he was defeated for that office three times. He was ultimately appointed “presidente” by a bribed legislature. The CIA just didn’t bid enough. As soon as he was appointed, Allende imported a brigade of the Cuban Army and imposed communism on Chile through a murderous nightmare.
The Chilean Army finally rose up against the Cubans and Allende at the behest of their own legislature and Supreme Court which had condemned Allende and his communists for violating the constitution and a reign of murderous terror.
The murals also deify Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, that dysfunctional union that tried to create a labor shortage by repealing the guest-worker program. Doing so deprived thousands of law-abiding Mexicans of the right to earn a living and kicked off the tidal wave of illegal immigration.
The murals also celebrate La Raza and Atzlan. Taken together, they espouse the superiority of “the bronze people” above all others in violation of every American principle while calling for a return of the western states to Mexico; who stole them from the Spaniards; who stole them from various native tribes.
One million, six hundred thousand dollars to paint anti-American, communist, racist propaganda on San Diego bridges for La Izquierda.
Bob Filner, who wants to be our mayor, and President Obama say that we need to raise taxes on those awful rich people balance the Federal budget.
I say they both need their cabeza’s examined.
Stirling, a former U.S. Army officer, has been elected to the San Diego City Council, state Assembly and state Senate. He also served as a municipal and superior court judge in San Diego.