Prickly enough?

The Friends of Hahamongna were tickled to be awarded the Doo Dah parade's Thorny Rose Award. We appreciated the recognition of our efforts to shine the light on the less publicly acknowledged aspects of Hahamongna planning. Since we are unfailingly polite and generally mild-mannered, we bridled a bit at the adjective "prickly" but accepted it as a reference not to any grumpiness or ill manners on our part but rather to our tenacity and persistence in support of this great open space park - prickly like a foxtail in an Irish Setter's coat!

Imagine my amusement to see Tim Brick ask the following question on the Arroyo Seco Foundation website: "Friends of Hahamongna gets the Doodah Parade's Thorny Rose Award, but are they prickly enough?" At first I just grinned and the old saying came to mind about how you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Tim's question lurked in my mind, though, and, as I thought about it more, it seemed like perhaps a very good question indeed. Maybe none of the Hahamongna activists have been prickly enough. After all it was 19 years ago in 1991, that a consultant to the City of Pasadena was quoted in the Star News as saying that "the consensus of opinion that we are hearing is that people really want it left as natural as possible." For 19 years the community has asked for a natural park and we're still fighting off roads and more soccer fields?

Maybe it is time to get prickly.