Street Photography Challenge #3

This is a post for K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge: Street Photography.  Since I live in a city, my challenge is to limit my entries. So I decided to divide the entries up into smaller segments and then post more than once. Here are today’s.

Front:

Back:

This last one leads to many thoughts. While I certainly would like to free Oakland from unaffordable housing, high prices in general, pot-holed roads, graffiti, huge income disparity, and most especially the brink of bankruptcy for the Oakland Unified School District, I somehow don’t think that’s what the person who scrawled the message had in mind.

In which case, what did the scrawler have in mind, if anything? Free Oakland from trash collection, electricity, water, gas, stop lights, police, firefighters, libraries and paramedics, public transportation and hospitals? The problem with this type of randomly written shorthand is that it reduces  the very complex problems that any city has down to a slogan that can mean anything or nothing, and would indicate that all the problems could be solved with the wave of some magic wand. Don’t misunderstand me. I love living in cities. I’m a city girl because I love the very complexity that comes with cities. I also love the diversity, the vibrancy, and the fact that in not all, but many, of the neighborhoods within Oakland a very real sense of community develops. And I certainly do understand that I am a person of privilege who does not have to worry about keeping a roof over my head or putting food on the table. But a random slogan put on the back of a trash can container without any ideas for improvement just makes me mad.