“Baby, Take off Your Cool”
Dear Editor,
I love the song by Norah Jones, “Baby, Take off Your Cool”( ‘I want to know you, I want to know you’). To me it’s the ripe answer to critics (letters to the editor from Jai Conley and Barbara Rozen) who want a Christo-like psychological fence between Marin and Sonoma, a veneer boundary that but for very old Spanish land grants and the hum drum of county government, is no border at all. Nor should the Sun break out Marin and Sonoma events artificially—no more than should so many daytime Marinites working here, who have no such border in mind when driving down Highway 101 and back, or on Lakeville Highway, for the commute along the blissful golden California hills and pastures. These critics say your paper should have boundaries, divisions, separation into county A and B. I say Bravo to the Sun’s cultural core that starts to erase what was never really there—a big-ass boundary between Marin and Sonoma. Tell that to someone who lives in Tomales, Two Rock, Valley Ford or Petaluma—not so. Tell that to 50 percent of the Marin workforce that lives to the North—not so.
If 2015 means anything, its brand is “take down that wall, take off your cool”—the walls inside us, of misunderstanding and false difference, false idol boundaries in thinking, of color, community, culture and humankind. It is about connecting and erasing boundaries. We are not—let’s hope not—the (Economic) Bridges of Marin County—parochial, insular, better, different, or oh-so-special more than our neighbors. Roads like Marshall—Petaluma, Chileno Valley Road and San Antonio, like San Pablo Bay, are one place—one serene, indeed surreal, place. Bravo Sun, for taking a mild eraser, and taking off our cool. We need it.
Mark Rice
