With no access to pools, it's sink or swim

Access to swimming facilities is more important than some people think. Swimming isn't just a good social event but it's also very healthy.

Greater Cincinnati has few if any natural beaches, and it's too cold or rainy for swimming for most of the year anyway. So around here, when you get a chance to swim, you jump at it!

Most of you probably don't have your own pool. But a few of you might be lucky enough to have family members who live at a condo or apartment complex that has its own pool. But this isn't always reliable. I planned to borrow such a pool this morning, but found it closed because the pump is broken and might remain so For The Foreseeable Future (tm).

Not everybody is fortunate enough to have even that, and those who struggle the most deserve access to pools too. You may recall that in 2019, I used a Cincinnati city pool. But last summer - under the guise of COVID-19 - this pool became open by reservation only, and only for brief time slots. This has been made permanent - even with the pandemic over. The purpose of this is to limit access to the public and reserve the pool for those with means.

Where does this leave the average person? They're very lucky if they have their own pool, and now even pools that were open to the public are limiting access or closing altogether. Pools that are still fully open are usually not accessible at all, because public transit has been reduced to a barebones system. The reduction of public transit was itself designed in part to deny people amenities like pools.

There's plenty of blame to go around. For most of my life, the Republicans were far more to blame than the Democrats for this. I don't think this is the case now, because there are so many psychopaths in the Democratic Party now. Unchecked psychopathy isn't completely new to the Democrats though. Even well before last year, there were a few regionally prominent Democrats who built their entire political careers around ridiculously insane and classist vendettas that have affected their targets for decades. They practiced the politics of retaliation and personal destruction. Sadly, in the spirit of partisanship, other Democrats wouldn't call out these insufferable tyrants when they had the chance. They preferred to hobnob with them rather than call them out.

The blame is truly bipartisan, and regardless of party affiliation, some of the politicians most responsible were horrible, horrible people.

The Cincinnati Post was mostly a fusty right-wing rag in its later years, but at least it had a few editorials calling out the city's recreation department for not opening pools in a timely fashion. The scarcity of pool access has gotten a lot worse since then, but nobody today dares to criticize it. The media has truly shifted the window of acceptable thought.