Yard Birds

New Haven, Connecticut

Axiomatic:  People are blinded by the limitations and exigencies of their own social circles.

What it means is that we really shouldn’t much trust wide-reaching public policy matters to such people.  Go for the kind of people who have a wide berth of experience with a lot of people, such as cops, teachers and snarky bloggers.

To wit:  Frank Gehry.

It took probably the most non Frank Gehry-y person in the symposium to tell the truth:

It fell to a formerly incarcerated juror, Dwayne Betts, to point out gently that neighbors might have security concerns about a prison where walls were decorative features and staying on site was more or less optional.“You seem to be designing prisons for people who shouldn’t be in prison,” Betts, who served eight years for a teenage carjacking and emerged to become a lawyer and poet, told one student. But the point was not to design things that would actually be built. It was to establish that there are public interests and human values other than retribution that ought to be reflected in the system we euphemistically call “corrections.”

I think it’s nothing more than the fact that Gehry is one of these people who, because he rarely leaves his own tight exclusive social circles, thinks that maximum security prisons are full of architects and symphony orchestra conductors and astrophysicists and neurosurgeons that just happened to have been caught with a little bit of weed.  Considering that Gehry is a weed advocate, as you can read in the original, he probably does think rather personally about law enforcement and marijuana.

Note:  If you’re walking away from this post thinking that I’m asking you to let Bon, Norm and I run the world, well then…