Fighting unfairness: Tucson Peace Fair

I love going to fairs, open air markets, and public gatherings to people-watch. And I did just that at Tucson’s Peace Fair this year. (I also attended the 2023 event which I believe was busier.)

As I wandered around taking photos, however, I kept thinking about the heart-breaking story on Bluesky from a young woman employed by the Forest Service that I had read earlier during the day. She wrote that she loved her field job in Wrangell, Alaska and had finally found a place where she felt she belonged — only to be fired by Musk and Trump, even though she had excellent evaluations. It seemed so unfair! Unfair, however, means nothing to them.

Then, I saw the woman from the Peace Center with her Fire Musk t-shirt and decided she had to be first on this post.

There were other signs addressing Musk and Trump’s shredding of our government, too:

But going back to the sights I normally look at when rambling around fairs, there were some t-shirts I liked:

Games for involvement with civic life

At two booths there were “games” for people to try out. At one, a woman demonstrated a board she had designed and pieces she had created to let a person plan their own neighbood. Where should houses go? Where should the bus stop? Where should trees be planted? How about a swimming pool?

The second “game” was a Penny Poll where anyone could pick up one penny and vote where their taxes should go by dropping the penny in one of the labeled tubes. The leader when I stopped by was “Health and Human Services”. Paying off the federal debt was dead last in the Penny Poll.

A big surprise was the booth for the Communist Party! Not that many years ago, they would not have shown their faces in public. How things have changed. But there were not many people hanging around to chat with these two men. The Green Party had a booth, too — also not a lot of people stopping to talk to them. The Tucson Peace Center booth was drawing more attention.

And there was fun too!

And it wasn’t all seriousness. At one booth there was a map of all the routes in Spain leading to the the shrine of St. James in Campostela. Many of these routes could be called ” Camino de Santiago”, although that name generally refers to the path across northern Spain from Bayonne, France. I sometimes wish that I had done that pilgrimage walk across Spain when I was younger.

In another “not-serious” booth a young girl was getting her face painted — a tradition at almost every fair nowadays.

For the future which I hope will be better: a children’s play area and across the street, the Tucson Children’s Museum. Looking at this image, I have to laugh at myself. When I first moved here the brown grass looked hideous–a sure sign of neglect. Now the brown grass in the park it looks normal. And the children, happy and carefree.

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