Published since 2005. San Francisco is a city that belongs to the people of the world. Hence this blog has a global focus. The name "Sam Spade's San Francisco" refers to an exciting era in the City's history, the time of Dashiell Hammett's fictional gumshoe and San Francisco character, Sam Spade. My name is Tom Dunn and I edit the blog. I'm not as exciting as Sam Spade, but I am definitely a San Francisco character.Contact or on Twitter -- Search blog below.
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Thursday, July 05, 2007
a Sense of Family
It was an absolutely perfect Fourth of July in San Francisco. While much of the inland was sizzling in triple digits, we were enjoying a sunny mid-seventies day with a mild and gentle ocean breeze. This delightful weather is bringing many more people to our City than usual. This year we almost certainly topped 150,000paying guestsfor the Fourth of July.
photo courtesy of Brian Lum
And, boy oh boy, how our guests do love to pay! The current statistics available from theSan Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureaureport that we host $15.7 million visitors a year who spend $7.3 billion with local businesses. Tourism generates $473 million dollars in tax revenue to the City and supports 68,652 jobs with an annual payroll of $1.83 billion. So, yesterday was a very loudKA-CHINGkind of day.
My husband and I (that's "husband" in the Queer sense of the word) drove out to Golden Gate Park to attend the annual Independence Day Concert by theGolden Gate Park Band.
The Golden Gate Park Band has been performing free concerts at theSpreckles Temple of Music(between thedeYoung Museumand theCalifornia Academy of Sciences) every Sunday afternoon for the past 125 years.The show this Independence Day, as it is every year, was great. The program included works by Aaron Copeland and, of course, the great marches of John Philip Sousa.
The benches were full and hundreds of people stood along the sides. It was wonderful to look out over a sea of people and see little US Flags being waved everywhere. It was a truly American scene.
As I looked over the audience I noticed that every race on the planet was represented and, amazingly, in almost equal numbers. It was a meaningful and beautiful thing to see. It was yet another reminder of what a magnificent and very special treasure San Francisco really is.
I saw great-grandfathers who could do little more than shuffle along. They were accompanied by their sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. They came, with great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and daughters - as a family - to celebrate our country's birthday.
And that is the real point of the Fourth of July. We are family. We are the American Family. If there is any power, any strength, any defense that will keep us safe and assure us of victory over our adversaries in this terrifying war against terrorism, it will be the defining of and the strengthening of our American sense of Family.
I'm not talking about the rally cry of right-wing Christians who distort the real meaning of family by trying to make it an exclusive club available to some and excluding others.
No.
I'm talking about our American sense of Family which is the recognition that America is the experience of many colors and many textures all coming together to form one unified, beautiful portrait of a free people.This is the American sense of Family and it is very much alive and well in San Francisco.
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