Hey,

Maggie Dunlap, Reminders for myself and acts of protest. Watercolor on paper.

It’s that time for another @culturestrike editorial cartoon!

So… Dolores Park in San Francisco recently introduced a pilot program in which people could pay to reserve portions of the park for up to seven hours.

San Francisco has been cracking under a certain amount of strain from the clashes of a changing city’s population. As more Silicon Valley money inundates the housing market and the demographics of the city shift, more entitled practices like this have begun to prop up all over the city.

From Google buses using city lanes to service their own techies without paying for their usage, to newcomers calling the police on residents who have lived in these spaces their entire lives, to police officers shooting homeless people who became homeless after being pushed out of their homes due to exorbitant rises in rent, to corporations like AirBnB posting obnoxious ads all over the city about paying taxes, the culture of this formerly progressive bubble has certainly shifted.

So imagine the uproar when it was announced that people would now have to now pay to reserve space in a public park supported by local taxes. The motion, from the onset, reeked of economic privilege. After all, would a group of local brown working-class students be able to afford the fee to reserve a space to play a pick-up game of soccer? That, after all, is what a public park is for.

Go to bit.ly/freedolores to sign a petition to tell park officials to abolish the program and to keep the park open and free to EVERYONE!

F*ck gentrification, y'all.

Artwork by @juliosalgado83. Blurb by @eslvis.