The Kumbaya Method of Cultural Conversion

Alcatraz: Future Home of Global Peace. Or at least that's what some hippy drippy trippy idiot would have it become.

San Francisco voters will decide on Tuesday whether to remove the famous Alcatraz Prison visited by thousands of tourists a day and instead create a "global peace center."

The proposition sharing the presidential primary ballot comes from the director of the California-based Global Peace Foundation who gives his name as Da Vid. He says transforming Alcatraz will "liberate energies, raising the whole consciousness of the Bay Area."

Supporters would like to raze the prison and build a medicine wheel, a labyrinth and a conference center for non-violent conflict resolution. Volunteers collected 10,350 voter signatures last year to put it on the local ballot.

But even in a city long famed for its embrace of counterculture, many are skeptical about he plan.

"Perhaps we haven't reached the proper stage of enlightenment yet, but we're more inclined to support propositions with defined sources of funding attached to them," the San Francisco Chronicle said in an editorial.{...}

I went on a tour of Alcatraz a few years back, when the husband and I visited San Francisco. It was one of those guided tours, where you wear headphones and listen to certain tracks as you visit different places within the facility, and one of the parts that struck me was when former prisoners reminisced about their experience and said that when the wind came across the bay from Oakland and San Francisco, they became miserable and depressed because they could hear the life they were missing out on. The sounds of traffic carried, but so did the sounds of laughter and conversation. One can only hope that, if such a place were to be built on Alcatraz, the wind would carry the sounds of guitar strumming, Kumbaya singing hippies to the residents of those fair cities---and perhaps, just perhaps, they'd get so annoyed they'd ditch their dippy hippy ways and would get with the freakin' program already.