Garbage Out of Garden Grove

Posted on June 11, 2006 in Stigma The Orange

I don’t buy that it is so hard to conduct a lottery of one that they had to completely cancel the process and wait again until next year. The City of Garden Grove allows fireworks sales. Each seller must be approved by the municipality. In the past, the permanent slots were given out on an first come, first served basis. Once you got one, you were grandfathered in and kept your location forevermore.

Naturally, groups like Pop Warner Football, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League, etc. were given slots. All of these were made in the image of the Good Family Values. The Right Kind of Charities. Never mind the homophobia of the Boy Scouts. Never mind that Pop Warner Football and Little League — all the “character building” propaganda aside– amount to nothing more than entertainments and babysitting with uniforms and athletic cups.

In comes Garden Grove’s Orange County Mental Health Association and the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance’s Orange County Chapter. We throw our name into the lottery. The deadline comes and passes. We wait, expecting to hear the announcement that we have been chosen. Word comes back that the folks in the City of Garden Grove “don’t know how to conduct the lottery because they have never done it before.” Well, it’s easy. You write MHA and DBSA on a card. Put that card into a bag or a box. Reach in. Draw out the card. The lottery has revealed that MHA and DBSA are the winners! Hoorah!

Except that is not what happened. We wait until two weeks before the deadline. Then the City of Garden Grove informs us that this is all too new to them. They want to postpone the lottery until next year. when they have “a better idea of what they are supposed to be doing”.

Or can pull the name of a group which doesn’t serve the mentally ill and declare the whole matter “fair”.

I don’t buy the story. I think the City of Garden Grove knows exactly what it is doing. Some yoyo bouncing off a darkened wall in that bureaucracy doesn’t want to give bipolars(!) access to fireworks. Why, we might shoot them off or light a fire the logic goes. We’d be dangerous.

I am one inclined to insist that they keep by their rules and grant us the stand. We need the money as much as any organization. There is only so much cash you can collect by passing a styrofoam cup around. The millionaire’s tax didn’t go into our pockets (in this county, a lot went to law enforcement for “training”). And a drug company recently stopped giving us an informal grant to print our newsletter. So we are pinching pennies and groveling for cash.

The City of Garden Grove ought to be ashamed of itself. Their patently ludicrous explanations suggest that stigma is involved here. Say nothing and maybe we will go away? Oh, unless there’s chance to put us in a pricey new mental hospital or give police training they should have got at the academy, you can rest assured that they will leave us to sit indefinately.

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On or shortly after July 1, watch for my official announcement of participation in the Blogathon on behalf of Orange County DBSA.