Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Postcard from Paradise


Aloha! Greetings from my villa at the Fairmont Kea Lani on the island of Maui. Day 4 went great. Went on a "snuba" cruise to an island, saw dolphins, sea turtles and a humpback whale close up. Was the only "single" woman on a boat of retired couples. Also the only person to shoot off the side of the boat on a water slide. A couple of the men looked interested, but were too fat.

My take-aways are:
1) the locals say "how long have you been on island?"

2) Mainland/mainstream americans in general think we are human "doings" rather than human "beings" I'm no exception.
On Maui, the native energy of the island is about "be-ing". It's okay not to do anything. Tourists have an exchange rate for "be-ing". If we pay enough money, it's okay for us just to be. As a type A, yang-infested classic westerner, this puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I am here on the island of be-ing. I have not paid what this experience is worth (due to my extreme luck) so have I earned the right to "be"? My roommates, Nancy and Nancy, have no trouble with days that look like this: beach to pool to bar to beach to pool to bar to nap to restaurant. I think they should look like swim to run to hike to read to write to nap to restaurant. But beach to pool to beach to pool is pretty darn awesome (and can include reading and napping).

3) I just figured out why men don't have to dress up but women do. It's so simple. And really now that i know it I realize that there really is no inequality. Women are dressed up because they're dressed up and Men are dressed up because they're with a woman who is dressed up. We are their clothes, their jewelry, their makeup. And it takes them a long time to get ready.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Women's Webcast for Boxer/Brown

Yesterday I helped produce a cutting edge live webcast in Los Angeles sponsored by Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the California League of Conservation Voters. It has former State Senator Sheila Kuehl hosting asking women leaders (including me) why they support Brown and Boxer over those CEOs. It's in two parts due to a little technical zap towards the end. Please distribute widely.


Part I


Part II

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

"My" ballot measure voting recommendations

Those who know me well know who really wrote these ballot recommendations, but I agree with them all and so I'm passing them off as mine. Please distribute widely.

Proposition 19 -- Yes

Legalizes Marijuana Under California but Not Federal Law. Permits Local Governments to Regulate and Tax Commercial Production, Distribution, and Sale of Marijuana. Initiative Statute.

The Prohibition approach toward this drug is neither fair nor effective. The criminal justice system is not the best place to address its use. Prop 19 would not in itself establish a regulatory and taxation system for marijuana, but follow-up legislation to do that has already been introduced.

Proposition 20 -- No

Redistricting of Congressional Districts. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Two years ago, I was one of the majority of voters who approved Prop 11, which took redistricting of state legislative districts out of the hands of the state legislature and gave it to a citizens’ commission. Before that commission has even had a chance to do its work, along comes this measure to also give it the task of drawing maps for CA’s seats in the U.S. House. Let’s give Prop 11 a chance to work before we change it.

Proposition 21 -- Yes

Establishes $18 Annual Vehicle License Surcharge to Help Fund State Parks and Wildlife Programs. Grants Surcharged Vehicles Free Admission to All State Parks. Initiative Statute.

Our parks have suffered from underfunding for years, so maintenance is way behind, operating hours way down, and staffing too low. Under Prop 21, an $18 surcharge every year will qualify the payor for free day use of all state parks. This will free the parks from being a political football at budget time, and free up some money for other programs.

Proposition 22 -- No

Prohibits the State from Borrowing or Taking Funds Used for Transportation, Redevelopment, or Local Government Projects and Services. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

I’m very sympathetic to the local governments who have had their funds raided by the state too many times. But this measure is too inflexible and would make it even harder to balance the state budget, which could reduce funding for schools, health, etc.

Proposition 23 -- No

Suspends Implementation of Air Pollution Control Law (AB 32) Requiring Major Sources of Emissions to Report and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions That Cause Global Warming, Until Unemployment Drops to 5.5 Percent or Less for Full Year. Initiative Statute.

Texas oil companies put this on the ballot to try to buy their way out of complying with CA requirements to clean up their fuels and refineries. They’re cynically trying to exploit the recession – which was caused by rampant greed in financial markets – to effectively kill our state’s pioneering limit on greenhouse gas emissions.

Proposition 24 -- Yes

Repeals Recent Legislation That Would Allow Businesses to Lower Their Tax Liability. Initiative Statute.

Because of CA’s absurd requirement for 2/3 supermajorities to pass budgets and taxes, Republican legislators were able to leverage into last year’s budget some new corporate tax loopholes that put the budget even further out of balance. This measure would repeal those loopholes and make the legislators think twice about such giveaways in the future.

Proposition 25 -- Yes

Changes Legislative Vote Requirement to Pass Budget and Budget-Related Legislation from Two-Thirds to a Simple Majority. Retains Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Taxes. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Speaking of the anti-democratic 2/3 requirement, 25 would allow passage of a budget by a majority of each house of the legislature. Voters could then hold the majority party accountable. The current system allows the minority party to hold the budget hostage, a recipe for fiscal gridlock and bad policies that get attached to budgets because they could never pass through the normal legislative process.

Proposition 26 -- No

Requires That Certain State and Local Fees Be Approved by Two-Thirds Vote. Fees Include Those That Address Adverse Impacts on Society or the Environment Caused by the Fee-Payer's Business. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

This is the Polluter Protection Act that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have put on the ballot to try to shift the costs of cleaning up their messes to the rest of us. If cleanup fees are reclassified as taxes, as 26 would mandate, it would become impossible to make the polluters – and other companies that cause social harm – foot the bill for mitigation of that harm, or for development of safer alternatives.


Proposition 27 -- No

Eliminates State Commission on Redistricting. Consolidates Authority for Redistricting with Elected Representatives. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute.

As I said on Prop 20, I want to give the 2008 reform measure, Prop 11, a chance to work. This measure would repeal Prop 11 and give control of state legislative district lines back to the state legislators, who have an obvious conflict of interest.

I won’t go into candidate endorsements here, but you can see Sierra Club California’s endorsements at http://sierraclubcalifornia.org/?page_id=98.

CITY OF SACRAMENTO BALLOT MEASURES

Measure B – No

No one likes paying utility fees, but they fund essential infrastructure for water, garbage and recycling systems. Local governments are already stretched for cash and have very few options for raising revenues. Passage of this measure would mean reductions in services.

Measure C – Yes

In the unlikely event that Prop 19 passes, the city should tax marijuana sales, as this measure would do.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Four Snouts up for Mauritius at Capital Stage


(:)(:)(:)(:) for Mauritus by Theresa Rebeck playing now at the Capital Stage in Old Sacramento. I should have known that this play was written by a woman. Even though, as the Sacramento Bee review suggests, the playwright is clearly deeply influenced by David Mamet, only a woman could have created the complex and 3-dimensional character of Jackie, played so ably by Kristine David. The play is by turns funny, tense, and funny and tense (like so many vehicles Cap Stage chooses).

In the first act, the exposition and over-the-top quality of the performances fought with the semi-believable premise of 5 people obsessed over two stamps in a collection. But the second act completely won me over with Kristine David's courageous, porous energy interacting with the power, skill and humor of Kurt Johnson, John P. Lamb and Jonathan Rhys Williams. Johnson is charming as the self-serving middle-man Dennis mediating between Jackie and Rhys Williams as his stamp buyer "Sterling," a completely improbable ex-con insane violent guy cum philatilist.

I wonder a little at the director Michael Stevenson's choices as to characterization. Did everybody have to be so incredibly wound up? It does seem written that way, but if I were directing this piece, I'd probably dial it back a little so that it's more simmering below the surface.

The rest of the cast is extremely solid with the exception of Lauren Bloom who plays Jackie's sister Mary. Usually I can tell if my antipathy is toward the character or the actor, but I think in this case it's a little of both. Clearly Lauren is a trained experienced actor, but she fails to bring any shred of likeability, depth or humanity to the condescending older sister she plays.

A final note on Kristine David. The program tells us that she is the only actor in the play that is not a member of the Actor's Equity union. Typically it is the equity actors that carry the play and the non-equity actors fill at an affordable price. In this production, the very young, beautiful and powerful Kristine David is without a doubt the star and a stand-out talent. Sacramento needs to see a lot more of her.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Mad Men feminist?


In 10-10-10 Washington Post yesterday, Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen College argues persuasively "Why Mad Men is TV's most feminist show" To make her point she walks us through the realism of the stark sexism, sexual harassment and reduced options for women that the show portrays.

Although I think she's right that the show is historically accurate, I disagree that the show itself is "feminist." I think the show is wickedly insidious because it is entirely from a male gaze (witness the constant close-ups on women's breasts and hips in tight period adorable outfits) which renders nostalgic the entrenched unquestioning sexism of the times.

Don't get me wrong. Mad Men is a brilliant show and I watch it faithfully. Yet, I fully understand the scores of women Coontz interviewed who can't bring themselves to watch it. Often at the end of a show I feel sick to my stomach. Upon inspection, what makes me feel sick is not that women lived through these times but that it is considered acceptable in 2010 for us to stuff this time period into a hot tight dress and lust for it.

It is difficult to imagine that the equivalent white nostalgic gaze applied to the racism of the early 60's would be hailed as black power. Indeed, I don't think it's coincidence that the shows pay as little attention as possible to the racial fault lines of the time as they do. Do we honestly think that it would be considered okay to glamorize the days when white power was completely unquestioned? No chance. A show like that would stand in constant critical scrutiny if not boycotts.

The reason: sexism is more socially acceptable than racism today (not that racism doesn't persist, but it hides from the public sphere as much as possible). Mad Men counts on it.

Friday, October 08, 2010

Four Snouts Up for It's Kind of a Funny Story

(:)(:)(:)(:) for It's Kind of a Funny Story in theaters now, at least in Sacramento.

The blurb review from the SF Chron that I read prior to this movie was insubstantial, something like, "3 1/2 stars, kid checks himself into a psych ward and wants to get out but ends up staying for 5 days and doing things." I mostly liked the 3 1/2 stars, the indie-ness and the fact that it was showing at 8pm around the corner.

So I was unprepared to be delighted. The movie was charming, funny, disarming, unpretentious, well-written and unpredictable. I literally slapped my thigh and heaved forward in my seat to gasp for breath at some of the scenes. Even the most minor characters are sufficiently well-drawn, cast and acted that you want to see more of them. Indeed the only criticism I'd have is that this little picture is so tight, so well cast, and so forces you to suspend any disbelief at its semi-absurd premises, that It's Kind of a Funny Story wants you to hang around and watch these guys do stuff. every week. at the same time. on the same (do we still have them?) channel. A true indie, no matter how good it is, should never ever beg for a sequel, let alone a tv show.

I doubt that this little pic will launch a zany sit-com set in a psych ward though, so, by all means, see it now before it ends up at the bottom of our netflix cue.

Friday, October 01, 2010

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

ANNALS OF INNOVATION
SMALL CHANGE
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
he world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.
The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywherealone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.
What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.
The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.
But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.
The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.
The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”
This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”
In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.
The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.
When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Jerry Brown surprises pundits with humor/relaxation

I watched the debate tonight between (former) Governor Jerry Brown and (former eBay CEO) Meg Whitman held at UC Davis. My husband Bill Magavern was in the front row as a guest of and surrogate for Brown. I sat at home tweeting to my 15 followers (literally) and commenting on various live chats and websites. From young to old, conservative to progressive, the pundits almost uniformly were surprised by Brown's relaxing style, great humor, poise and vigor.

When Brown answered the question about why we should trust that he's going to focus on the business of governing rather than running for President, Brown answered "age and marriage." Basically, at 72, after 8 years in the Governor's non-existent mansion he'd be way too old to run for president (otherwise, he confessed, he would) and he's married now, he won't be out carousing in the bars, he'll be home with his wife and better able to focus.

Humor and charm notwithstanding, he was often substantive and displayed a depth of knowledge of the issues. Whitman did nothing to embarrass herself, just completely failed to distinguish herself in anyway. My 15 year old wondered, "shouldn't there be a limit on the number of times you can use the word, 'streamline'?" He has now forbidden me to use it (also "paradigm shift" and "apropos").

Brown also engaged in good old-fashioned class warfare, going after Queen Meg for her billionaire buyouts and proposed tax breaks for millionaires.

And it worked. At least for my mom. You'll remember my mother, she's a retired teacher in San Diego, registered Democrat. I consider her the bellwether for mainstream Dems in California. And judging from my mother, the base in energized for Brown now, even where it wasn't a week or two ago. For months my mother has been complaining about Brown, threatening to vote for Whitman. Tonight, with the combination of Whitman's recent attacks on teachers unions and Brown's charisma in the debate, she is all in for Brown. No antipathy, no ambiguity, all out, "we've got to elect this guy!" And that's what's needed.

Full disclosure: I am now employed as a consultant in an effort to help get out the messages of consumer, labor and environmental groups that support Brown.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Nine Years After 9/11, Let’s End the Fear

You may want to read a piece on fear and 9/11 that I wrote for ministerial class that was posted on the Center for Spiritual Living Santa Rosa Blog. It begins:

--Today marks the 9th Anniversary of the attack by Al-Quaida on the United States. In the intervening period, it seems that the politics and culture of fear in the United States has escalated. I am writing this statement today to declare that nine years of fear was enough; let’s spend the next decade living in hope.

From 2001 to 2010 our government responded to and accelerated fear through an erosion of our civil liberties: the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to travel, the right to counsel, the right to confront your accusers, and the right to privacy all have been abridged, trampled upon and narrowed by the U.S. government in the name of safety from “terror.” As a result it is harder to travel, harder to protest government actions, harder to communicate freely and above all harder to trust each other.

At the same time, a culture of parenting from a position of fear has taken hold. “Helicopter” parents hover over their children’s every move. Rather than being given the increasing freedom that growing older used to naturally bring, many of today’s children are prevented from walking or biking to school or friends’ houses. They are in constant contact with their parents and others through electronic devices. They often spend most of their non-school hours glued to television, computers and video games rather than engaging in imaginative play, or being outdoors. Those children who parents keep them active often pursue punishing schedules with an endless array of sports, lessons, and prescribed commitments. A “good” parent worries about car safety, food safety, air safety, safety, safety, safety.

For more click here.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Our Prayer for The State Budget


The power, purpose and presence of God is all there is. It is the only truth. Everything else is a lie.
The truth of God is perfect love.
The truth of God is perfect abundance.
The truth of God is perfect peace.
The truth of God is perfect joy.
The truth of God is perfect wisdom.
This being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth there is no way to be outside the truth.
It is the be all and the end all, the alpha and the omega, the whole enchilada.

And so I know that I am one with God, that the divine consciousness of the one Truth is accessible in, as and through me.
As I know that for me, I know that for each and every person in California. The people of California are the living embodiment of God.
As I know that for the people of California, I know that for their elected leaders: the Governor of California, each and every member of the state legislature, the Finance Director and every staff person or lobbyist connected with the State budget process.

Specifically I know that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, Assembly Speaker John Perez, Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, Assembly Minority Floor Leader Martin Garrick, Senate Budget Committee Chair Denise Ducheny, Senate Budget Committee Vice Chair Bob Dutton, Assembly Budget Committee Chair Bob Blumenfield, Assembly Budget Committee Vice Chair Jim Nielsen, State Finance Director Ana Matosantos are each connected to the one Truth, the One Mind, the One living consciousness of the Divine God.

I know that each of us is an elected representative of God, a representative of love, a representative of abundance, peace, joy and health.

Elected by the people who are the living embodiment of God and being the living embodiment of God themselves, our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern. They are servants of the One Mind, the One Heart, the One Love, the only force, the only truth, the integrated whole of the universe.

There is no separation on the planet.
The lines that separate us are fictional. Republican, Democrat, left, right, lobbyists, legislators, citizens, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the environment, labor unions, trial lawyers, oil companies, polluters, auto companies, utilities, poor people, disable, teachers, students, prisoners, guards, hospitals, doctors, patients, children, elderly, women and men, we are all one.

Humankind has worked with its own creative God-given powers to bring into seeming reality the following limitations: deficit, recession, 2/3 voting requirement but these too are artificial constraints, more easily removed than it may seem. In God, there is no deficit. In God, there is no recession. In God, there is no structural impediment to change. In God, there is no 2/3 voting requirement.
In God, there is no furlough Friday. Simply put: In God there are no limits.

All are simply appearances of the One, illusions of the human mind, powerful stories that are only stories, not the truth.

Today I relinquish my attachment to these stories.
Today I relinquish my attachment to these limits.
Today I relinquish my attachment to the parameters of the possible.

I embrace infinite creativity.
I embrace infinite change.
I embrace infinite abundance.

There is enough.
Just as there are enough stars in the sky, sand on the beach, water in the ocean, love in our hearts, there is enough food, there is enough shelter, there is enough money, there is enough ideas, time, willingness and willingness.
There is enough.

Our leaders can do this.
Our leaders have the resources, the support, the intelligence, the willingness, the creativity and the political will they need in, as and through God showing up as the people of California and them.

The water we are swimming in is the Divine Water of God. It is great, come on in!

Thank you, thank you, thank you Divine Mother-Father Spirit for blessing this state with the amazing people, beauty and treasures that it has. Thank you for our trusted public servants. Thank you for our democracy. Thank you for seeing fit to allow millions of people to come together and pool their resources to create a better life for each and every Californian and each and every person on the planet.

Thank you for the safety and health of the People of California and their leaders. Thank you for food, shelter, health care, education, security, jobs, clean air and clean waters. Thank you for balance and integrity. Thank you for everything that you have provided.

Knowing that the leaders and people are one with God and that everything we need is right here, right now already I know that this State budget is already divinely created, balanced and funded. I release my need to control the details or the outcome and simply let go and surrender to the One.

I know the great law has already said a resounding Yes!

And so it is.

Amen.

How the Prayer at the Capitol Went

On Wednesday, June 16, 2010 the Center for Spiritual Awareness, along with a rabbi, a Catholic priest, an Episcopal priest, a Lutheran minister, a (scheduled but didn't show imam) and several other new thought ministers held a prayer service at the Capitol for the state budget. Attendance was modest (maybe 20 people in addition to the clergy), but the feeling was high. Rev. Georgia Prescott, my minister, led off the event with a prayer/treatment I wrote. I think I'll post that separately so that you can read it but it doesn't muddy up this post.

The press coverage was decent though. After an interview over the phone, the New York Times wrote this cute piece which is actually not all that snide. Click here for the official link but here's the cut and paste version:

Big Budget Gap? Call In the Big Guy
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: June 16, 2010


LOS ANGELES — And on the first day without a state budget, the men and women of God gathered in prayer at the Capitol to beg that he guide the mortals in closing a gap of biblical proportions.

A day after California lawmakers missed the June 15 deadline to have a budget in place, leaders representing 10 faiths sought “divine wisdom” on Wednesday, offered prayers and demanded that God occupy a seat at the budget negotiating table, joining the so-called Big 5: the governor and the four ranking Senate and Assembly leaders.

“We are calling for a Big 6,” said Sara Nichols of the Center for Spiritual Awareness, a former lobbyist and minister-in-training with the nondenominational religious community that organized the event. “We wanted to bless them and say, ‘They can do it.’ ”

It just may take a while; last year, the budget came in a month overdue, and the year before that, the budget was delivered a record-setting 85 days late, and the year before that — well, suffice to say it is more newsworthy when the $83 billion budget is on time.

This year, the fiscal misery befits Job: a $19 billion deficit, legislative gridlock that has defied even a governor with an action-hero past, that same governor mightily resisting the lame-duck mantle, and an election year that makes compromise — increasingly a four-letter word — harder still. All this while the state comptroller warns that it gets harder to pay bills the more the state pushes past the July 1 start of the fiscal year, just two weeks away.

Mere “human creations,” Ms. Nichols scoffed. “They don’t have to tie us down. There is room for creativity and divine intervention. What is inspiration? It draws on the other power we have.”

Representatives of the five mortals at the table said they would take whatever help they could get.

“This is going to be a tough budget,” said Aaron McLear, a spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, “so we appreciate the support.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 17, 2010, on page A15 of the New York edition.

The Capitol Weekly ran a photo of the collected ministers (including yours truly). Click here and scroll to page 3 of the June 24, 2010 issue to see it. I can copy the picture but can't figure out a way to put it here.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Ed Howard's Speech Is Already Making a Difference

I'd really like you to take a moment to watch my friend Ed Howard's speech on to the PTA on foster youth. Beyond being an extraordinarily powerful and moving speech it's already generated enormous interest and is moving people to make a difference in the lives of foster youths in their communities, particularly as they "age out" of the system at 18. Let me know what you think. It seems to me that if every one of our communities sponsored one of these kids, there are such a small number, we could really make a difference in their lives

PTA Speech from Children's Advocacy Institute on Vimeo.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Santa Monica 2 Sacramento--Road Trip Day 7--ex post facto


I woke up early and went for a longish walk along the palisades along with prayer and meditation amongst the bums. Returned to 3 people ready to get on the road. We mobilized, hit exactly no traffic, and got home by 5pm. It is good to be home.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Santa Monica 2 Venice--Road Trip Day 6--ex post facto



We sleep in (yay, first day to do that!). Which still means that I'm up before teens doing my meditation and prayer and going for a walk. The teens basically don't move until after we eat uninspiring sandwiches in the room.

Then it's the basic walk from Santa Monica to Venice Beach (we called it a half mile to get them moving, it's really a couple). The girls loved the street vendors and shopping. The boys got sick of it.

Eventually we go out on the beach at the northern tip of Venice and plop down. The kids get completely soaked and swim in their clothes (although we had suits with us, they couldn't be bothered to put them on a strategy in which they were ultimately vindicated as I trudged barefoot (what could I have been thinking?!) to a horrible nightmare of a bathroom with God knows what on the floor, no toilet paper, a long line, everything you imagine in a Venice bathroom ... and less...to pee and change into my suit.

Bill heads back as I join the kids for a short swim. Too cold in the breeze to wait to dry off, we do the wetsuit death march back to S.M. If they had been younger they would've been crying the whole way. At this age they were miserably catatonic.

Showers, naps and frantic Googling and Yelping produce an acceptable French restaurant on the Third Street Promenade called Monsieur Marcel--French-style service but a lovely outdoor cafe with solid food.

From their the kids headed back the Ocean View for reading and electronics. Bill and I were off to see The Arsonists at KOAN at the Odyssey in nearby West L.A. It's a recent resurrection/translation of a WWII era swiss play which is, albeit didactic, fascinating, funny and oddly applicable to the current times. I recommend it to people who really love theater, not to people who actually only like plays and movies because it's a bit contrived and stagy for that set.

Sigh, nice to sleep in the same bed twice...

Friday, June 25, 2010

Phoenix 2 LAX--Road Trip Day 5--ex post facto


(published a week and half after the real day in question)
Phoenix, Arizona For the 5th day in a row, we will wake in one place, go to sleep in another 100s of miles away, I am grateful that we have chosen to do this for only a week, not the 3 weeks we originally painstakingly planned (although I also continue to grieve for the abandoned itinerary).

I set the alarm to get up and out of Phoenix before the heat. We are rushing to meet Bill's plane at LAX some 700 miles away. The drive is smooth and fun. You know, all the drives have been fun. The kids have mostly insisted on sitting in the backseats together (so they can talk and conspire against me). It's safer that way and actually seems to give me some measure of freedom up front, plus I can pile all my junk on the seat next to me and easily multitask on the road giving me one more reason to tell the kids to do as I say, not as I do.

On the road trips they read a lot (my mother bought me a Kindle for my birthday and we each have a book on it--like all electronic devices I purchase, they use it a lot more than I do), E plays long games of solitaire on her ipod. N is more likely to occasionally talk with me or initiate one of several games we rotate (the only car games that we or even Hoyles know of: Boticelli, Third of a Ghost, and Geography). We also play a card game called Rubberneckers where you draw cards that tell you what to look for on the road and you have to spot those things to accumulate points. Don't worry, the kids draw my cards for me and tell me what to look for.

The most fun part of Rubberneckers is when you have to make a gesture or something to another driver in another vehicle and get a reaction back. This is surprisingly difficult to effect. N has to make the "Junior birdman" eyeglasses at 10-15 drivers before they give a response other than a hostile glare (which doesn't count). E, as a younger-looking female, has better results than a 6' 3" 15 year old male--and it isn't cute at all but vaguely insane/obscene when I, while driving the car, have to make the airhorn pumping sign to truck drivers (this makes us engage in a lot of nervous speculation and laughter).

Miraculously on this drive without even stopping for lunch, we make it to LAX and Southwest airline's gate in 7 hours on the dot to pick Bill up just as he emerges (the only hitches being a) fitting him in the car and b) weathering a scolding from a belligerent airport security agent for picking him up on the wrong side of the lane. We peel out laughing, happy and, for my part, exhausted and make our way to the Ocean View Hotel in Santa Monica.

Upon arrival we voluntarily accept a steep discount to downgrade from an ocean view room with a balcony to a back-room with neither. With two double beds and a single futon on the floor we are cramped but happy. At the risk of offending millions, I feel a little like a happy immigrant family grateful to be out of the refugee camp and into our own space. Bill Yelps us to the Iterim Cafe, a vegan-friendly wheat free eatery on Wilshire a few blocks from the hotel. The food is fresh, imaginative and delicious (although the joint is clearly more of a happening business lunch spot than dinner, we are happy to have the place to ourselves). I stagger with exhaustion down the third street promenade and shortly thereafter collapse in the room while Bill takes the kids down to the pier for a turn on the ferris wheel.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Hopi 2 Phoenix--Road Trip Day 4--ex post facto


The early light and impending heat wakes us and convinces me to convince my kids to take a run with me on the reservation land adjacent to the housing development (apparently there is a good dirt road to run on). Our 11-year old hostess leads the way as the teens and I play out an age-old Tortoise and Hare story with them, of course in the role of the Hare. The go much faster, but I am the only one to run the whole way and finish--ha!

After a fascinating chance visit with a friend of our hosts who works for the Hopi Foundation (we exchange prayers and note similarities between our traditions--mine being religious science), we head off for an official tour of a largely ceremonial but partially functional ancient village of Walpi. It is strangely familiar as if from a dream (or, more likely, I learn upon returning home to consult with my husband, he and I toured the same village about 10 years ago on our own romantic tour of the region before our friends lived on the reservation).

After making sandwiches for a large group, we hit the road early for Phoenix, our next destination. It's a long hot drive beautiful at first, then odd as we tour the recent ghost town of Two Guns and pass an extremely life-like Giant Baby that briefly convinces me I've lost my mind.

We arrive at my college friend's downtown Phoenix paradise on the hottest day of the year so far, 115 degrees as we dock. He and his partner are mixed use downtown pioneers in a city that otherwise stands as a poster child for sprawl. They have built a tiny but gorgeously detailed and thought through two-story plus building with a gallery and marketing business offices on the first floor and beautiful apartment and glorious deck on the second.

Despite the heat, we can't resist grilled chicken and veggies out on the deck with spectacular views of both of Phoenix's office clusters to the north and south and mountains to the, what, north and east? Our hosts, Russ and Mike are by turns charming, self-deprecating and awe-inspiring bringing us up to speed on the latest in their rich despite cash-poor existence. The evening ends with a full tour of the house, the highlight being the latest exhibition in their gallery: local artists' completely reworking and painting of reclaimed refrigerators--the kids are enchanted by the color and imagination, not to mention the lavish notion of taking an elevator downstairs in one's own home to one's own business and gallery--wow!

See this video for a tour by my daughter of the fridge art:


As I drift off to sleep, I am, not for the first time, moved to tears with gratitude for remaining and even growing closer to Russ over the 30 years since our escapades in the student government of Reed College. Not all my old friendships have taken this trajectory--what a blessing this is!

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Grand Canyon 2 Hopi Nation--Road Trip Day 3--ex post facto


(this is the third in a series of posts put up almost two weeks after I actually went through these days).
It was a perfect starry cool night at the Grand Canyon and I slept great. The next day I awoke slightly dizzy from the altitude, N had a cold and E was grumpy and had a blister from walking miles in flip flops in Vegas. So we dubbed ourselves, "Dizzy, Cold and Toe Package" and headed off for a wimpy hike on the western part of the South Rim--which is nonetheless an amazing 12-mile section where you can hike a section, get on the bus for a section, hike a section. We only walked a little over 2 miles but were astonished how few people were actually on the trail with us--we often had the canyon to ourselves. Despite the beauty and occasional solitude, it was quite the contrast to the fantasy I have of backpacking to the floor of the Grand Canyon--still very much a goal of mine.

For a variety of reasons, at the end of the walking day, we decide to forgo the second night on the rim and pack up to head to our next destination: Hopi Indian Reservation. With no cell phone coverage in the Park, I buy an old school calling card from a machine and use it at a pay phone. It costs about 25 cents a minute.

We called our friends who live on the reservation, "can we come earlier?" they say yes, despite a brief worry that we're being held hostage (long story).

As I hang-up, I shake off a concern that I should have asked for more precise directions. Surely I've got all I need in my compulsively assembled folder of information printed out from the computer weeks before the trip and checked the night before and morning that we left.

We break camp quickly and have a beautiful late afternoon departure from the park. No traffic on a Wednesday afternoon. Grateful for last minute advice to head out the eastern rather than southern exit (thereby avoiding a long detour that Mapquest wanted us to take through Flagstaff), we head over to the great metropolis of the drive, Tuba City, population 85 on the edge of the Hopi Reservation.

In Tuba City we chance dinner at the "Szechuan Restaurant" staffed by American Indians. It serves surprisingly tasty food--better than any Chinese I've had in Sacramento (with a huge Chinese population--a subject for a whole nother blog).

As turn onto highway 264, I reset my mileage indicator on the car, telling the kids that the only "address" we have is a milepost on this highway (something that has made me a little nervous from the start). As I check my web-aided directions I learn that in fact, I don't even have that milepost, I just have the spot that Yahoo Maps decided was the right point on the highway when I entered that milepost into the search engine. I gulp and soldier on.

The spot on the map turns out to be the Hopi Cultural Center (which I actually recognized from a previous trip with Bill). We look around nearby and see nothing remotely resembling the type of dwelling my friend (a physician working for the Hopi Nation and her family) would be likely to live in. I pull out a package of quarters and head for the payphone to call the house. Their 11 year old answers and brightly informs us that she has no idea how to tell us to get to her house from where we are, or even where we are. She vows to call her parents and call us back. She doesn't.

About to call her again, I see a group of random natives leave the cultural center. Acting on a hunch, I call out, "excuse me, do any of you know Andy and Anna Lewis?" They do. A nice pair approach me and give me flawless directions. It is another 10 miles. If we boogie, we can maybe make it before dark (fairly important as there are no lights of any kind on the highway).

We book east, finding by far the most modern development on the stretch, a small southwest style subdivision built to go with the large health center in which Anna works. We easily find their home and the adventure ends with a warm reception, 2 dogs, 3 cats and a great evening passed in conversation (for me) and reuniting with internet (for teens).

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Vegas 2 Grand Canyon--Road Trip Day 2--ex post facto


(posted a week later) Waking up in Vegas, the city that never sleeps (and we were there on the Summer Solstice no less, so fitting to be somewhere completely electric light dependent on the longest day of the year!), we mobilize quickly for the 2 mile walk from our hotel room to the car in the Circus Circus parking garage. Well, first the kids ride on the roller coaster (say it's very good and big, not a tiny one like most hotels have ;)).

We drive out headed for the antithesis of Vegas, from a man-made wonder of the world to one of nature's greatest triumphs, the Grand Canyon. On the way we crawl through Hoover Dam traffic (I wondered when the concierge said "you have to go around the dam to get to the Grand Canyon" in a sort of weary voice, and now I know, you inch along for miles before the dam). On the plus side, the kids enjoyed referring to "dam traffic" and wondering if we could stop for a "dam soda" or "dam french fries"--we didn't.

The dam traffic, you'll be glad to know, is caused by keeping our nation and the Colorado River reservoir safe by requiring each car to slow down so that a couple of dumpy (I should talk) uniformed women can peer in to the vehicle for a 1/2 second to determine whether you're a terrorist likely to blow up the dam. What are they going to see? Anything short of dynamite piled on the front seat with a lighter is likely to escape their attention. That's me above in front of the Hoover Dam.

Arriving at the Grand Canyon at dusk is, of course breathtaking. E had wondered for the last few miles, "is this canyon really going to be so grand? Or is it just going to be another big canyon?" I didn't try to convince her of anything, just said, "you'll see." And she did. I had seen it twice before. First time for the kids.

Our camping spot in Mather Campground on the South Rim was wonderful--in a quiet non RV corner, right up against a large patch of no campgrounds (in which we saw an elk as we were making camp but we didn't act fast enough--see this video for details: ).

Monday, June 21, 2010

Sacramento 2 Vegas--Road Trip Day 1--ex post facto


Road trip day 1, the kids and I depart Sacramento for Las Vegas, NV. Long day, leaving at 8am arriving 6pm with few stops. We stay at Circus Circus hotel on the far end of the strip--$23 a night on expedia and worth every penny (but not more). The entire hotel common areas reek of cigarette smoke. The carpet is ancient. It takes 20-30 minutes to get from our hotel room to the front of the hotel.

But the room is clean and serviceable and quiet. There is no smoke detectable there. There is s large roller coaster inside the hotel. Did I mention it costs $23?

From there we run/walk a mile plus to dinner reservations at Tacqueria Canonita alongside a canal at the Venetian. The kids love the fake outdoor setting (somewhat reminiscient of the Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant at Disneyland). The thing is the food is actually excellent. E's enchiladas are to die for. N's steak is fabulous. My fish and pineapple tacos are super tasty. It costs $70 for the 3 of us, considered a deal for such a meal.

From there we plow across the street to the Mirage. It's dark now and we ooh and aah as we go. None of us have ever seen the strip at night before. (no not me either, unless I was a small child and don't remember it). We watch Love the Beatles Cirque du Soleil show at the Mirage (totally sold out to a huge crowd at 9:30pm).

It is amazing! A must see. (:)(:)(:)(:)(:) I honestly don't know when I've seen a better show of anything ever. The combination of acrobatics, costumes, staging, dance set and most of all previously unreleased Beatles studio recordings music is unparalleled. I loved every minute of it even though I was dog tired and I'd like to see it like 10 more times.

Vegas was way too much. Too much people. Too much lights. Too much money. Too much everything. I wasn't unhappy to leave after less than 24 hours there but I also wish I had a week there (at a quiet hotel near but not on the strip). The kids loved it and I'd like to let them explore all the other things they wanted to see.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Watch out for the tiny man of Southside Park


For several months, my son and I have noticed a little man that walks around Southside Park in our neighborhood. Walking around the park is apparently this man's livelihood. It is virtually impossible to go to the park at any time of day or night and not see the tiny man.

The tiny man is very sweet and friendly. He seems to recognize us and smiles and waves and says hi. It always makes me happy to see the tiny man.

This brings me to the reason for this post: the tiny man is shrinking. When we first saw the man, he was, maybe 4' 10". He's elderly; he's from a smaller people than we are; and so his height seemed fairly within the norm. But now, a few months later, he is only about 4 feet tall. Not only that, but every day that we see him, he seems to be even shorter. My son and I theorize that he is literally walking himself into the ground.

Like the tigers in the Little Babaji story who slowly turn into butter as they chase each other around a bush, the tiny man of Southside Park may lose as much as a 1/16 of an inch for every lap we walks. At 50 laps a day, that's an alarming rate of shrinkage.

My point is that soon the tiny man of Southside Park will be so small that we will have to take care not to step on him or injure him. So please, as you walk in or near Southside Park (like if you go to our famous farmers' market on Sundays under the freeway), take care and watch out for the tiny tiny ever tinier man.

P.S. The image shown right of the woman holding the tiny man says that it is not to be used without permission, but that is exactly what I am doing. What do you think will happen to me?

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

My Synchronicities with Jungians


The great psychologist C. G. Jung coined the term "synchronicity" to refer to those coincidences that occur to which we attach great meaning. Deepak Chopra later wrote a book on coincidence called The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: harnessing the infinite power of coincidence which convinced me that Jung was right: paying attention to coincidence is a power clue to one's life purpose. As Chopra puts it, a coincidence isn't interesting because it occurs, a coincidence is interesting because we noticed it. The coincidence or synchronicity is a clue to what is most important to me on the level of my "non local intelligence" or what Jung would call the unconscious mind.

So I pay attention to coincidence. Recently I not only had a couple of big coincidences, they were Jungian coincidences. Not in the sense that EVERY coincidence is Jungian, but in the sense that they involved Jungians.

Coincidence 1: I stayed for 2 days at a wonderful retreat center in Lake County (above Calistoga, CA) called the Four Springs. On the last day, in a closing ceremony someone read aloud the names of the four founders, all of whom were Jungians. I audibly gasped (causing some concern with my ministerial classmates) when she read the name "Lucille Nixon." Lucille Nixon (I checked, it's the same one) was a close friend of my grandparents who ultimately willed her half of a cabin in Yosemite to my grandparents (who owned the other half). Although that cabin burned to the ground in 1990, we rebuilt in 1998 and to this day I spend many waking hours either in that cabin or wishing I was in it or helping other people get in it. What a thing!

Coincidence 2: I just finished a distance course on the gnostics taught by Dr. Stephan Hoeller of Los Angeles. Noting that he teaches from a Jungian emphasis and that he is in Hollywood and that he is of an advanced age and that he had a drawing from the Tarot on one of his materials, I wrote him a note with my first paper submission telling him about my Jungian inheritance from my grandmother Sally Nichols who worked with Jung in Zurich some and who at the end of her life wrote Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey, a wonderful book that was translated into many languages and survived many printings (now out of print).

He wrote back that he knew my grandmother, had heard her lecture on Jung and the Tarot and had written a book himself on the tarot! He is inviting me down to visit him and see his gnostic church (in which he is a Bishop). How cool is that?

Monday, May 31, 2010

My Recommendations for Candidates--Statewide

I am a "Decline to State" voter who likes to vote on the Democratic ballot so as to influence the Democratic primary outcomes, so that's what I will be doing this time. Here are my picks for voting:

Lieutenant Governor:
I plan to vote for Gavin Newsom, current Mayor of San Francisco (aka "Mayor McHotty"). The Lt. Governor job is largely ceremonial and unimportant but the officeholder does sit on several boards and commissions, providing the swing vote on what I think is called the State Public Lands Commission, a key environmental body. The Sierra Club gave its endorsement to Gavin Newsom after interviewing him and considering his record. That's good enough for me.

In the spectrum of San Francisco politics, Newsom is considered a centrist and a sellout. After years of seeing San Francisco "centrists" elected to the State legislature and end up being some of the most leftwing and effective members up here, I have come to love them: send us your tired, your poor, your San Francisco centrists. It takes a San Francisco "centrist" to go cowboy renegade and issue marriage licenses for gays and lesbians against state law. Wow what would a truly leftwing San Francisco mayor have done? Probably seize and redistribute downtown real estate to recently married gays as wedding presents!

Attorney General:
This is a tough race to decide in because there are so many people running. I definitely would not vote for Alberto Torrico or Rocky Delgadillo who are both more conservative Democrats that have not been there for the people. Kamala Harris, the San Francisco DA is the only woman running in a crowded field so there is some pull towards her (and she'll probably win the primary) but her department is under an investigation right now that casts some doubt upon her respect for civil liberties and she has not displayed the depth of knowledge on some issues that are important to me.

Even though he's a longshot, I'll vote for Pedro Nava, current assemblymember, ethical and nice and smart, the only candidate for A.G. endorsed by the Sierra Club and latino from southern california who may have a better chance against the Republicans in the fall.

Insurance Commissioner:
Dave Jones. See my previous post on this. Both are good assemblymembers and men. Dave will just be the tougher, harder working regulator and I think he'll win.

Member, State Board of Equalization, District 2:
Chris Parker. This is a huge district stretching all the way down the state so even if you're not in Sacramento you may have to vote in it. Parker was recommended to me by a former top staff member of the State Board of Equalization whom I trust.

United States Senator:
Barbara Boxer is doing a great job and will face a tough race in the fall.

Governor:
Although there are 7 candidates listed on the ballot, Attorney General (and former Governor) Jerry Brown is effectively running unopposed for the Democratic nomination. I am not wild about Jerry Brown. I'll probably vote for him in November, but I haven't decided yet. In the meantime, since it will have no effect on the outcome, I'll write in my husband Bill Magavern for Governor since he would be better than Jerry.

Secretary of State:
Debra Bowen, the incumbent, is running unopposed and is doing a good job. I'll vote for her.

Controller:
John Chiang, ditto above.

Treasurer:
Bill Lockyer, ditto above.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Bill Magavern's Personal Ballot Prop Rx

Prop 13 – YES

Would remove an obstacle to seismic retrofits by exempting them from property tax reassessment. Of course, what we really need is wholesale reform of the bad old Prop 13 that has distorted property tax assessments, but that will have to wait for another day.

Prop 14 – NO

The hype is that doing away with party primaries and going to a “Top 2” runoff system would decrease nasty partisanship. The truth is that this system would increase the importance of special-interest money, since all candidates would have to fund 2 elections. The Top 2 system would also virtually eliminate the already-slim prospects that smaller parties have for breaking the 2-party duopoly. It’s not popular to say it, but strong parties are actually healthy for democracy, and parties should be able to decide who votes in their own primaries. The problem with state government is not too much partisanship, it’s the anti-democratic 2/3 requirement for passing budgets and taxes that empowers a dwindling minority to hold the state’s treasury hostage.

Prop 15 - YES

The Fair Elections Act would create a pilot project to make voluntary public financing available to Secretary of State candidates in 2014 and 2018. It would also repeal the current prohibition on public financing.

Public financing is a way to get politicians out of the fundraising game and back to solving California’s problems. Replacing special-interest money with clean money would ensure elected officials are accountable to voters, not donors, and open up the political process so the best candidates, not just the wealthiest candidates, can pursue elected office.

Go to http://www.yesfairelection.org/ for more information and to volunteer or contribute to the campaign.


Prop 16 – NO

This is an outrageous attempt by Pacific Gas & Electric to lock out competitors who could supply cleaner electricity at lower prices. PG&E is spending almost $50 million at last count to deceive Californians into granting them full monopoly status. The measure would require a 2/3 vote on any new or expanded public power effort. Why should 1/3 of voters be able to overrule the majority?

To help, go to http://noprop16.org/


Prop 17 – NO

The second of this election’s special-interest initiatives, this one is Mercury Insurance’s attempt to put a loophole into 1988’s consumer-protection Prop 103. It may sound reasonable to allow an insurer to lure customers by offering discounts to the continuously insured, but insurance is a zero-sum game, so the result is that other people – like students, military personnel, and the poor -- would have to pay more.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Yes on Prop 15!

I can't imagine what has taken me so long to write this endorsement. I have been supporting and highly involved (until now) in pursuing public financing of elections in California for years. This is a no brainer. This initiative creates full funding from a fee imposed on lobbyists to pay for elections for the office of Secretary of State. It also repeals a current ban on local areas creating public financing of elections--in and of itself needed.

The only people opposed are lobbyists, but fortunately they don't have any political clout. It's endorsed by almost every newspaper in the state (which the notable exception of the Sacramento Bee. I'm chalking this major mistake up to the existence of Ginger Rutland on the editorial board, who has never met a campaign finance reform measure that she liked.)

Public financing of elections is different from campaign limits mostly because it works. Instead of trying to restrict the flow of money (you can't, it will flow), you match it with public dollars rendering it unable to buy elections. In states like Arizona, Maine and Connecticut the experiment with public financing of elections has largely been successful. Voters have higher confidence in their elected officials in those states because they owe their election to the people who voted for them, rather than the people who financed their campaign. Well, to put that another way, now they're the same people.

Politicians are freed up from dialing for dollars and actually do their work. Vote for this initiative and click on this link to see how you can help in these last two weeks.