I have this suspicion that I just can't shake that most of the insiders in left-sympathetic institutions would be perfectly happy to turn all of the establishments they've inherited into community gardens. It's like the community garden is the final evolutionary telos for the predominant type of mainline protestantism, liberal arts colleges, etc.
"The Library Board had decided that when the bloodthirsty tycoon Abraham H Parnassus built the Cathedral of Truth with the mission 'to render from that slumbering continent of Man his vital and Promethean magma of Reason,' we think that he really meant that people should be kind and gentle and the kindest and gentlest thing we can think of is to just have a nice empty lot with some half-assed sunflowers in it where hobos will sleep on the bench."
I think there was a switcheroo in the 60s where a lot of Faustian progressivism got retranslated as "do good stuff in general," and since then "good stuff" has been interpreted by left-sympathetic people as "end (what we consider to be) oppression."
And it almost goes without saying that the academic left has been hard at work redefining everything from parking tickets to literacy standards as oppression.
So now the Abraham H Parnassus Fund is emptying its treasury to pay for parking tickets.
So since only plant life seems to be blameless in the Oppression Olympics, all the big institutions that command power, money, status, etc. license themselves to cede all of their power, money, status, to the barest appearance of plant life.
And this really rubs me the wrong way in dense urban centers where these shitty community gardens represent a theft from the common value of density created by the Polis.
These powerful institutions usual have monopolize sites in dense urban spaces, meaning that they have a lot of direct control over the value of the commons. And what they choose to do with their sites by creating shitty half-ass gardens is they either cede these sites to abuse or turn them into walled gardens. Both are insults.
Imagine instead if the Abraham H Parnassus Fund chose to use its institutional resources, and by extension its site, for uhhh actually doing something that developed human capacities. Then they would have a right to occupy the town square, for purging abusive actors (out of protection for good-faith participants), and they wouldn't actively harm to Polis around them.
Anyway human flourishing is vastly more important than plant life and I'm gobsmacked this has become an operational problem in the dense urban cores of the developed world.
By redefining the goal of the Abraham H Parnassus Fund from "educate people in this particular place" to "hashtag resisting whatever Ingroup has targeted as Oppression," the Fund has given itself a vertiginous expansion of freedom. This, in turn, requires that the Fund must vastly expand its operations to include voluminous quarterly reviews in which all directors must regularly write their own objectives and define their own metrics -- or failing that, the Fund has to hire Metrics Consultants.
I guess this is my real gripe: no one on the cultural left really has a solid idea what "oppression" is anymore. Oppression is power targeted at the wrong targets, and Ingroup gets to say what the right targets are and even what power is. Maybe the melting of an ice cube is oppression. Maybe the power to melt is the ultimate form of power. Give me enough whacks at the PoMo theory apparatus and I can make the melting ice cube a vector of oppression.
Only plant life seems to get a pass.