Ok. We admit it.
Once in while, when boredom sets in and we get tired of the 24-hour news recycle on the Alt-Left and Alt-Right news channels, we surf to the city public cable channel for a tedious change of pace.
On one of those monotonous spaces we happened to come upon a segment featuring local bicycle paladin – and gynecologist and city commissioner – la chisquida Rose Gowen.
Gowen, who has managed to hijack millions in grant and city funds for her pet hike-and-bike trails, the 7th and Park Cafe of her cronies, and other accouterments of the Brownsville gentry, was on the screen gushing over the new signage placed on the potholed city roads.
This time, the new sings weren't just bike signs, no. They were called "sharrows," a kind of clever play on "share" and "arrow," to denote that motorists should share the road (without a bike lane) with their chisquidao brethren. As Gowen explained it, the signage will make drivers aware that there may be bike riders around, that they exercise due diligence and not run them over, and that they remain vigilant to avoid striking them.
One of our friends suggested that the signs looked like police drawings of a homicide scene where someone had been killed. You know, the outline of the guy lying prone where he fell.
Still another one said it reminded him of "Coming to America," when Eddie Murphy (Prince Akeem) is renting an apartment in the ghetto and the landlord is showing him a run down tenement where the silhouettes of a man and a seeing-eye dog (and a cane) are still painted on the floor.
Well, the new "sharrows" led us to think how many local city leaders – like Gowen and her ilk – seem to think that appearances mean more than tangible things.
Here we are in Brownsville, without debate one of the most impoverished cities on the U.S.-Mexico border lacking the basic necessities of an urban center such as sidewalks, bus shelters, an adequate drainage system, a second-rate airport, a dismal mass transit service, or a city government without an administration that can adequately run it, and we settle for signs.
Despite all those shortcomings, we can spend thousands to send a city delegation on a junket to Colorado to go buy an "All American City" designation that allows us to post signs all over to let people know that we are a great city, if in name only.
And harking back to the days of former Congressman Solomon Ortiz, we have been unveiling and putting up signs notifying people that they are on Interstate Highway 69-E, when in reality it is just U.S. 77-83 with new interstate highway signs. The highway is the same. It's just the signs that are new.
We have signs of just about everything and have spent thousands – if not millions – to "rebrand" ourselves to fit our new fantasy that we are making progress.
For example, the bakery owned by Da Mayor Tony Martinez is not your average South Texas panaderia. It's a "bistro."
What will the signs of the future be, painted drainage grates so we can imagine the city doesn't flood after a moderate rainstorm? Or maybe bringing back the "Ignite" Texas logo for which we paid $100,000s that was supposed to mean that Brownsville is "poised" to launch its future to infinity and beyond subsidizing billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX?
A sign! A sign! We need a sign!