Over the weekend, California authorities punitively dumped literal tons of sand into two beachside skate parks… in an effort to enforce “social distancing.”
Now? Young Californians are reclaiming their parks… with shovels and buckets.
The two parks–one in Venice Beach and one in San Clemente–had been closed since April 1 by the state of California, under the state’s stay-at-home order. But, for weeks, skaters didn’t listen–ignoring the “Closed” signs, and using their beloved parks anyway.
Authorities then moved to take action. San Clemente dumped 37 tons of sand to make the park unusable on Friday afternoon. The next day, the authorities in Venice Beach followed suit.
An Instagram user named Connor Ericsson posted through his profile, “Buttery Films,” that he had taken back over the park… and was using it for dirt biking.
“Took advantage of all the sand the city dumped into the San Clemente skatepark,” he wrote on Instagram, with a video of him and a friend on their dirtbikes.
That video was reshared on Twitter a number of times–including, apparent.y, by one of Ericsson’s skater friends, who captioned it: “LOOOL checkmate government dweebs. Turning skatepark into a dirt bike track now.”
But then, Ericsson wrote that he “helped some local skaters dig it all out” so they could continue to use it for skateboarding.
Ericson later shared a video of himself, as well as a number of local youths, cleaning up the skatepark with buckets, brooms, and shovels.
The apparently punitive decision to destroy the local skatepark attracted huge controversy on a national level–after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) slammed the decision on Twitter.
“Clearly, the greatest public- health threat imaginable… a kid on a skateboard,” Cruz wrote. “Young people, remember, this is what Big-government statist Democrats do–they take away your freedom.”
He added: “And to all the Lefties defending California’s idiocy, skating alone poses ZERO public health threat to anybody. You want to enforce social distancing in public spaces, fine, but filling a skate park with sand–so nobody can use it–is authoritarian abuse of power.”