Outside Gated Community America's Fences

From the LA Weekly, Steve Mikulan's report from an effort by religious leaders and grocery workers to deliver petitions to Safeway CEO Steve Burd:

“It’s not just our fight, it’s everybody’s fight — it’s every union’s fight,” Cynthia Hernandez, a five-year Rolling Hills Pavilions employee told the crowd. With her short black hair, glitter-dust eyeliner and pierced nose, the 21-year-old Hernandez looked like a Hollywood club girl until she spoke, in a quavering voice, about how she and her 2-year-old daughter, whom she’d brought with her, were living uncertainly from day to day. “We must fight these people, we must fight Steve Burd,” she continued, her voice cracking with emotion. “We know deep down inside he knows what he’s doing is wrong. We are his workers, we are his people.”

Soon afterward, the crowd marched a few blocks to Burd’s neighborhood to find out just how true that was. The marchers would never glimpse the CEO’s house, however — they would not even be allowed to profane with their footsteps the asphalt leading to it. For there is another kind of American Dream, one very different from that of Cynthia Hernandez and her co-workers. This other American Dream is built on gated subdivisions, surveillance cameras and private roads; it is a feudal fantasy tended by housekeepers, drivers, tutors, publicists, personal trainers and security patrols.