Dear Editor,
Richmond has become a consummate example of how an obsession with and acquiescence to financial and investment capital and gain has been allowed to subsume our concern for preserving our community’s cultural capital.
Cultural capital is defined in terms of the values and traditions that people learn, acquire, and inherit from their families, friends, and their established culture. It is accumulated over time, requires constant commitment and mutual support, and is the glue that binds a viable society together. Squander or allow your cultural capital to be undermined or destroyed and you dissolve that glue and end up with a society built around individual, self-concerned priorities rather than shared values and commitments.
Richmond does not have far to go to become almost entirely an outpost of investment interests that remain entirely unconcerned about the state or preservation of our community’s cultural capital. There is only one type of capital that concerns these interests and it is entirely centered around how Canadian communities such as ours can be exploited for their gain. While unqualified, undereducated, self-interested and disinterested politicians have ignored the need to protect and preserve Richmond’s cultural capital, an uninformed, somnambulistic citizenry has woken-up to the crisis far too late to be able to mount any effective resistance to the erosion taking place around them.
Our illustrious mayor is publicly raising concerns about the loss of farmland to industrialization. I guess it was not politically advantageous for him to show the same level of concern in regards to the transformation of our once vital residential neighbourhoods into affluent ghost towns filled with empty mega-houses owned by people who have no intention of ever becoming involved, contributing members of our community. Kind of makes you wonder which “capital” Mr. Brodie is most committed to promoting or defending, doesn’t it?
Ray Arnold
Richmond
