The Chronicle editorial board chose to offer advice to the YWCA today, for the second time in a week:
Leaving public shelters at an impressive pace, evacuees from Hurricane Katrina nevertheless will be reeling for a long time. Among the most fragile may be children — exposed to horrendous experiences in their own city, mere spectators as their parents try to adjust to this one. For all the newcomers, a healthy routine will be key to recovery. In a car-centric city with meager park space, many of the children will lack places to play.
The gorgeous Masterson YWCA off Waugh Drive could be such a place. Filled with rooms perfect for classes and workshops, the gym centers on a junior Olympic swimming pool in a room where huge glass doors can be raised in warm weather. The play area is expanded many times over by the meadows of Spotts Park next-door.
Making this precious resource available to flood victims for six months or a year would harmonize perfectly with the YWCA’s overall mission. A vanguard force in the nation’s civil rights movement, the YWCA now includes among its goals empowering young women and healing the damage of racism. It could find no better clients than Katrina survivors in Houston. Houston’s YMCA has already recognized the need, opening a YMCA for evacuees at Reliant City. But soon the stadium will empty.
Unfortunately, the YWCA last month closed its fitness program as the first step in selling the building.
[snip]
Hurricane Katrina has prompted soul-searching on national priorities — among them, the kind of planning that keeps a city healthy. YWCA leaders should reconsider their priorities, as well.
This is one of the more bizarre editorials we’ve seen from an editorial board that pumps out bizarre editorials with regularity.
Here’s a suggestion for the editorial idealists: If you really feel so strongly (and you must, since this is the second editorial on this topic in a week), then every one of you should round up several corporate sponsors each to “adopt” this pool that you want the YWCA to maintain. Keep a running tab on the editorial page of every corporate sponsor recruited by each editorial member, and the amount of money pledged. Have a column also for the public at large to donate. If it’s that compelling, surely corporate Houston and the public will respond. Of course, it would also be an indicator whether anybody is actually paying attention to the editorial page (we have our doubts), so for that reason we don’t really expect to see it.
Still, if the editorialists are serious about preserving this swimming pool — as if it’s the only swimming pool in the whole city — then they ought to get serious about it themselves. Maybe they could even get Hearst to throw in some bucks.
