Free Speech vs Public Transit in San Francisco

Can one hundred people shut down the public transportation system in a major city? When the city is San Francisco and the system is BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) the answer is a resounding yes. As a working commuter, an advocate of free speech, a person opposed to assassinations by BART police, and a proud survivor of the social protest movements of the seventies and eighties, the kind of power that a small, dedicated group of protestors weilded this evening was astounding

The fact is BART police, hand-in-hand with the SFPD brought the traffic in San Francisco to a standstill all because of a handful of vocal folks with signs. The protest was called because the original demonstration against the BART police murder of Charles Hill in the Civic Center BART station on July 3rd, 2011. Hill was a forty-five year old mentally impaired individual. On New Year's Day of 2009, BART police officer Johannes Meserle shot and killed Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station. With this kind of a track record, it's easy to pinpoint why those trigger happy boys in blue are having so many problems in the Bay Area.

As we look at the events today it is imperative to remember a few things:

First of all, people have the right not to get shot in a public transit station just because they're mentally ill, black or a bit mentally off. This, you would think, goes without saying.

Second, when methods of communication media are tampered with by authorities this smacks of totalitarianism. Iran, Egypt, China, all other speech-supressed nations come into focus.

Third, it is a total overreaction to mobilize as many law-enforcement officers as protestors to try to attempt to abrogate a simple protest, i.e.: freedom of speech in action.

Yes, people were protesting the BART shootings as well as the intentional wireless disruption to prevent organizing.

Whatever emotions these activities bring up is a separate issue. Shutting down the BART system along with the MUNI bus and trolley lines is not only an uncalled for overreaction by the authorities, it is also a breach of the U.S. Constitution.

Verizon Workers Strike to Retain Pensions and Healthcare

Verizon Workers Fighting
to Keep Their Benefits

Striking Verizon employees are trying to hold the line against the erosion of their healthcare and benefits. Theirs is the latest battlefield in the class war being waged against the American working people. Verizon corporate management is trying to ride Scott Walker's coattails to obliterate unions and the middle-class working conditions that they provide. It's all part of the great race to the bottom, fueled by right-wing fervor and Obama administration supported downgrades and take-aways.

Further complicating matters in the Verizon situation, the wireless workers are all non-union while the old land based phone service workers are with the CWA (Communication Workers of America). So pitting the two factions against each other is a made for management dream with the wireless workers representing the "future" of the private sector.

Verizon management is pleading poverty and income losses in the land line segment of their business, a ploy that president of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka has called a "smokescreen."It is evident now to almost everyone that the lowest echelons of society are paying for the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy. Management now has now been given a green light to erode all the gains of the past and chalk it up to the crash and burn economy, another demon of their own creation.

We can see even mainstream economists such as Robert Reich and Paul Krugman openly acknowledging that the American working people have been taken hostage and because our president has paid their ransom, we have lost.

The media is running with the ball, saying the Verizon strike has gotten ugly. As though bringing in scab workers to undermine collective bargaining power and steal people's jobs is not a violent and provocative move, in and of itself. Yes, people are angry. Confrontational behavior is the rule, not the exception under these circumstances and it is understandable considering that folks' livelihoods and survival are on the line.

Verizon workers may be in for the long haul and we can only hope that they will be successful in their struggle.

When Businesses Answered Phones, and Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth!

A Woman of Another Era
Answering a Telephone

I've been too depressed to blog much lately. The atrocious debt ceiling sell out, the stock market crash, the continued attacks on workers rights, immigrant rights, LGBT rights, all these things have been weighing on me making it difficult to sit at the keyboard to write anything.

I've also been dealing with some health issues; not the life-threatening kind but the exhausting kind that require a complex orchestration of  faxes from my primary care provider along  with a highly complex choreography of appointments with specialists. A total production that is not getting rave reviews from the critics.

I have joked that I have a managed care health insurance plan, as long as I play the role of manager. Getting a medical problem that requires specialists treated is every bit as consuming as trying to fight identity theft, foreclosure or anything else requiring a strictly synchonized string of telephone calls.

As a boomer, I can remember a prehistoric time before answering machines, when a person could call offices during business hours and actually speak to a human being. In the eighties and nineties this feat was still possible. With the coming of the aughts and the great recession on its heels, it is now officially impossible to make phone calls directly to human beings, no matter what time of the day they are placed.

Now I understand why folks abrasively answer their cell phones at the most inopportune moments and we are all forced to listen to the intimate psychological details of their relationships on public transportation, in waiting rooms and at the supermarket. I haven't sunk to that level yet, but, in order to get my medical problem resolved, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that this rudeness is what I may have to resort to.

Will the Sky Fall With the Debt Ceiling?

Are these the final moments of our financial lives before the US plunges into default? The media certainly has whipped up a frenzy of emotion around the debt ceiling crisis. I am not an economist. When the economy fell over a cliff in 2008, I didn't believe it would affect me at all. I wasn't a Wall Street investor. I'd owned my home for nearly 20 years. But I was wrong on that one. It turned out that because I have a public sector job with a pension, I was not safe. Nobody is.

The irony is that most middle and working class folks have already lost so much that, emotionally, it's getting hard to rise to the bait of these trumped-up crises. It begs the question: How much worse can it get? Unfortunately, as someone who has traveled quite a bit in the third world, I know that answer and it isn't pretty. The upside is that people do set priorities differently when their lives aren't centered on money and things. When relationships assume greater importance than material objects, it's like seeing the whole forest instead of just your personal tree.

On the other hand, I don't want to romanticize poverty. Having shelter, food, clothing and access to decent medical care are concrete conditions whose importance can't be overstated. With or without the debt ceiling fiasco the powers that be are already reaching into our pockets and helping themselves. On a personal level, my medical co-pays have doubled in the past year. Transportation costs are skyrocketing. You can literally take a bus from one end of Costa Rica to the other for what it costs to get across the bay on BART.

To add insult to injury, Obama's alternative to stave off US default in the face of Republican intransigence involved raising the age that people can get medicare from 65 to 67. Those extra two years of health care denial would make the 3,000 plus people who died on September 11, 2001 seem like just a drop in the bucket. Homeless, throw-away people litter the streets of San Francisco. Will the sky fall if the debt ceiling is not raised?

The truth is it is already lying in pieces all around us.

Celebrating Life Outside the Box

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood...

Spending time in rural California really brought the differences between urban and country life into focus. While the quiet simplicity of country living can be somewhat of a draw for me, the conformity of many small town folks is not. Marriage and family plays a huge role in the lives of most mainstream Americans. I realize that this is a no-brainer for the majority of people out there but, as someone who has live outside of the heterosexual family structure since the death of my mother and grandparents in 1973, it always comes as a bit of a shock.

Here in the Bay Area it is easy to find people who live outside the nuclear family detonation radius. The world of books, museums, education, science, friendship beckons from all corners. But during my recent travels in the hinterlands, the subject of marriage and children was continually being raised by strangers along with the unspoken assumption that we all participate in these rituals.

A waitress in a cute restaurant in Truckee chatted about her fiancee and finally setting the date. A group of hikers went on about the wedding they had just attended. Children and husbands were always near the top of the conversations initiated by store clerks and shop owners. I understand that these were not deep, substantive relationships but, back home, all these folks seem to have a broader range of small talk topics. And this is all because one word: diversity. I now realize that if I want to try living in a small town, it had better be a very non-traditional one.

Marriage and the subsequent offspring it brings forth undeniably serve as a cornerstone of life on this planet. Even young LGBT folks have taken to this approach with a vengeance. But, in a time like ours, when consciousness seems to be reverting back to the nineteen fifties, it is imperative to remember that the road less traveled is lined with priceless scenery. The greatest contributions to art, music, literature and the cultural life of a people have been made by outsiders, people who do not live by a pre-programmed itinerary, but make up the rules as they go. And urban centers have always been havens for these dispossessed, places where "otherness" can be both supported and validated.

As the conservative among us celebrate marriage, families and the rearing of children, we should step back and think of the artist in her garrett, that weird guy drawing science fiction comics, that eccentric old woman with her lovely garden and too many cats and, of course, ourselves, in all our limitless variety, rejoicing in drama, beauty, tenderness, sadness, even anguish in the blank space that once held only emptiness and silence.

Methinks The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

Michelle and Marcus
those Batty Bachmanns

Helen LaFave,
lesbian stepsister

Shakespeare's age-old insight resonates in the case of Michelle Bachmann and her husband Marcus and their emotionally-charged crusade against LGBT people. Michelle, in spite of her lesbian stepsister, has a real bee in her bonnet (not to mention bats in her belfry) about, not only the rights of queer folks, but our very existence as well. Our "homosexual agenda" is, in her twisted mind, a plot to take over the world. (I thought we Jews had the monopoly on this...what happened did we sell the franchise?).

And yes, as in the case of Anita Bryant before her and in spite of the nausea factor, I do wonder about Michelle's undercover sexual leanings. It takes a lot of repression to cultivate a passion of that magnitude. Oy, and then there's Marcus, her flaming hubby. It isn't difficult to spot the gay in Marcus, no matter how hard he tries to pray it away. Poor schmuck, he even tries to "help" other people exit the "sad lifestyle." And yes, it is sad to be in the closet. It takes a very high personal, emotional toll to live a lie.

Taking away our civil rights seems to be the primary goal of this demonic duo, so we do need to stop laughing long enough to make sure that this belligerent broad and her sorry spouse don't wind up anywhere near the presidency. Otherwise we'll all have to spend hours sewing pink triangles on our clothing!

Nature, Capitalism and the Universe

Donner Lake

Spending time away from the rat-race alters perception in a myriad of ways. Nature is something I didn't see much of as a child. It was at least a two hour drive from where we lived to the countryside with its farms, rivers and forests. The urban landscape was mostly all I knew and, to me, it went on forever. Now I understand why people who incorporate religion into their lives are most often rural folks. Feeling small in the presence of something large and majestic is daunting and reassuring. Like some of the acid trips of my past, the natural world can be a keyhole opening into another reality, a glimpse at something more.

However I interpret it, the experience makes it harder to get back to the daily grind of working. For me, job-related activity is a stretch even in the best of times, as it is for anyone who must repress creative desire to economic necessity.

I was on the reference desk with a colleague who has an artist friend employed to create video games. "What a great job, she must love it!" was my reflexive response. She replied simply, "She loves it the way you love your job, you love your job, don't you?"

And I do enjoy my job, especially compared to some of the other things I have done to earn a living. But that doesn't change the fact that would rather be writing, creating my own work. Thus, the difficult march to the proverbial different drummer. It's a struggle I can't win. My more committed co-workers do not like my emotional distance from my work and bosses do not approve of my "attitude." These factors may prevent me from scaling the ladder of success, but not from acquiring great  material for a story.

So, I have returned with a thud from the Eastern Sierras. Next week I will be back at work, a changed being, someone who has been to the mountaintop, taken nourishment there, and come back with a souvenir both precious and intangible; the sense that the all-consuming, merry-go-round of daily life is only a fraction of a universe that is beautiful, vast, boundless and unfathomable.