Letter to the Editor; "Burdett Gossip Girls"

The Fourth Ward was, is, and always will be the affordable housing neighborhood, a critical ingredient to the functioning of our city as a whole.

Like the Statue of Liberty, she welcomes our tired, our poor, our troddened masses, our wretched refuse, our homeless, and tempest-tost. We live-and-let-live, and help each other out, and overlook our imperfections, and do the best we can with what we’ve got. A kid can give his mom a dandelion, because they actually grow here.

Then the Burdett Gossip Girls invaded, creating a hostile environment with their fear mongering, becoming a cop-call-central to allow our meager neighborhood funds to be siphoned to supplement the police and code budgets.

The Burdett Gossip Girls should have been arrested at the Planning Commission meeting for their slanderous unfounded allegations of pedophile, stalking, rape threat, defecation, and theft rantings - ruthlessly beating up on our very most vulnerable neighbors.

The neighborhood does not trust the Burdett Gossip Girls. Like city slickers who move to the country and then complain of the smell, the Burdett Gossip Girls need to become a good neighbor, or move to the other side of the river to be with their own kind. Manicuring your lawn does not help the poor.

Until a better men’s homeless shelter comes along, stop throwing our guys out on the street at night.

K. Andreah Briarmoon

Ms. Briarmoon has been a Fourth Ward Neighborhood resident and homeowner since 1973, at 339 South Locust Street, the August Buggs Barber key-hole house Queen Anne Victorian 1895.

She is a former financially destitute divorced welfare recipient single mom of five children, displaced homemaker, prior victim of domestic violence, non-traditional re-entry student, welfare warrior, neighborhood organizer, political activist, paralegal, former board member of Legal Action of WI, League of Women Voters, Community Action Program, National Clients Council, and WI Pro Se Inc., and co-founder of the Community Development Block Grant Board.

She says: Originally, we-the-neighbors spent all of that annual Community Development Block Grant money, our way, for our neighborhood. Instead, this year, a trifling $5,000 only “they” gave us, out of our own money, to the Neighborhood Action Team. Wake up team! You were supposed to get the whole $750,000! YOU are supposed to be that board, not “them”!

Ms. Briarmoon has a Bachelors Degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin Madison, specializing in the ethnography of neighborhood culture. She has been self-employed since 1990, and is a licensed Realtor Broker, a published author, and a cable TV host. She has nine grandchildren.

She encourages you to become a member of C.A.R.D., Citizen Association for Rights and Dignity www.changeforjanesville.com.

She can be reached at 608-754-3999 k.andreah@briarmoon.us www.briarmoon.us