Commentary: To draw district boundaries through existing communities is to sacrifice hard-built bonds for the sake of numerical notions.
Anthony Chavira dribbles the ball up court while playing a game of basketball with friends at Woodlawn Lake Park.When I think about redistricting, the process in which we divvy up council districts based on population changes, I recall a Buddhist teaching warning against focusing on the finger when pointing at the moon. The late monk Thich Nhat Hanh, explained it as, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.
For example, the redistricting advisory committee released a plan that would effectively split up the neighborhoods and neighborhood associations for Monticello Park, Jefferson, Woodlawn, and Greater Harmony Hills. There’s no confusion about it: balanced numbers drew these socially unbalanced lines, and the committee members were eager to explain why.
We’re talking about San Antonio people, puro people. We’re residents, business owners, workers, retirees, students, families and veterans. We are talking about beloved communities that cannot be explained by individual constituencies or mere census data. To draw district boundaries through these bonds is to sacrifice hard-built communities for the sake of numerical notions.
Sure, the Voting Rights Act compels us to comply with numbers, but the Voting Rights Act was not written to separate individual people with math. Rather, it was enacted so that we could guarantee positive social impacts on whole communities. The American philosopher John Dewey said it best:
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