Letter to the Editor: A Sense of Shame for San Ramon

As a long time resident of San Ramon, I feel a sense of shame for San Ramon for having a mayor who believes that it is all right to speak of discrimination as a worthy goal.

Is it OK for Abram Wilson to speak of discriminating against non-citizens as if they were non-persons, as they were unworthy of living in San Ramon’s new affordable senior rental apartment complex?

Many seniors in San Ramon are legal residents, but not American citizens. Their children have come to the United States, received a top notch education and a good job in a career their parents have sacrificed to provide them. 

Once accomplished and settled citizens of the United States, these children send for their parents so that they can live out their life in America with all the blessings they can enjoy. 

They have come in their senior years with only the wish to live near their successful children, perhaps too old and tired to go through the studying and difficult process of becoming U.S. Citizens. 

They do, however, become registered LEGAL residents and pay taxes and contribute to the U.S. economy as any other U.S. citizen. To demand U.S. citizenship in order to live in our San Ramon senior apartment complex, flies in the face of all that is fair and equal – virtues by which, if I am not mistaken, we have touted to foreigners looking to legally relocate to our wonderful county. 

San Ramon is, by definition, a multi-cultural community which has many new residents who have parents who would like to be treated as equally as their children.  It is a disgrace to think they may not be able to. 

To evoke Rosa Parks in the mayor’s statement to the press shows how clearly he does not see the difference between what that remarkable woman, a woman who helped spearhead the Civil Rights Movement, did for civil rights and his request of the City Council to demand only U.S. citizens to be allowed to live in our senior community.  

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks for more information. Rosa Parks would have been appalled to be associated with discriminating against anyone. She knew what it truly meant to be marginalized and discriminated against. She put her life on the line for equality.

Mayor Wilson says he wants to ask the City Council members to be complicit in his shame. 

I think what the council should do instead is sanction him and ask him to publicly apologize to the legal residents of this city that he appears to be trying to disenfranchise.

I wonder what the two council members who are going to run for re-election this fall in San Ramon will do.

– Jim Gibbon, San Ramon resident and founder of San Ramon Open Government