In these eight months of being reacquainted with the natural splendor of my hometown, I have savored the opportunity to obsess over organic beauty (tulips included). My next destination (departure scheduled for early August) will be New York City–my previous hubs were the concrete jungle of Los Angeles and palimpsest of Rome. So as the countdown begins for my next city habitat, I take my remaining weeks marveling once more at flora and fauna in this video short.
General Motors’ Chief Executive Ed Whitacre announced today that GM anticipates”solid” first quarter financial statements. In January, when the then-newly appointed CEO made assurances that GM would turn things around, the auto company had just received $50 billion in federal aid and hadn’t turned a profit in five years. Last year, the auto industry couldn’t keep out of the limelight, but in this present news cycle–dominated by health care, nuclear weapons, earthquakes, and other critical issues–positive signs of improvement in the auto industry and, some say, the economy’s overall health have not warranted much attention.
Though there is still a long road to to recovery for GM and the economy at large, it is worth noting that within a year of declaring bankruptcy, Whitacre is keeping to his predictions of profits. In this post-bailout climate, news of success after government takeover is just as significant as disappointing headlines announcing that corporations given government monies continue their morally and financially bankrupting business practices and the shirking of responsibilities to tax payers.
To get an idea of just what kind of impact the government bailout of the auto companies has today, I interviewed Dan Roseland, owner of the local Sonoma General Motors dealership. The very helpful Roseland gave an overview of this struggle and its impact on this local community. Excerpts from that interview are in this short video above.
Please excuse some distracting ambient noise. This interview experience was an instructive lesson for me as I hone my skills as “backpack” journalist–the writer, producer, cameraperson, interviewer, and editor all-in-one. Alas, in pursuing this newfangled journalistic practice, one could still benefit from a sponsor that might offer a lavalier or boom mic.
In 1793 William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that:
“to create a little flower is the labour of ages.”
Since the first Tulip Chronicles post documenting the first sign of growth on January 23rd, every one of my tulips has grown and several of them now have mature flowers. Even in this age of instant gratification, it is surprisingly satisfying what the Earth – and a little help from a gardener – can create in just one season.
They’re all grown up!
It is also gratifying to experience something for its entire cycle, not just to know a product, but to know how it came to be. It is one thing to appreciate a tulip purchased in a grocery store and something more to understand its life stages, challenges, and pleasant surprises–from leaves that are eaten by critters to waiting for the first bud. Even I am awed that those 19 cold, hard bulbs I buried in a wheelbarrow are now blooming, thriving little contributions to spring.
It is quintessentially San Francisco to stumble upon thousands of people, with smiling faces and feathers stuck in their hair, whacking each other with pillows, just because it’s fun. The event, with its surreal quality lent to by dainty white feathers pirouetting through the air, seemed too good to be true in this day of politics and bureaucratic red tape. Unfortunately, it was. The pillow fight has now come under threat by the Department of Public Works.
We were exploring the Chinatown district afoot when we kept running into people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, some in elaborate costumes, with pillows tucked under their arms. We followed the trail of white feathers, flurrying into the air as cars drove by, and the advice of some excited pillow-bearing locals, and finally arrived at Justin Herman Plaza near the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.
It was an awe-inspiring scene as thousands of people ran, laughed, frolicked and pillow-fought through the plaza. Every few seconds, pillows would split at their seams, and their feathery contents would explode majestically into the air. Some people stood in two parallel lines on raised platforms, forming a tunnel, and rained down pillows on those brave enough to run through. We were pillowless, but we nonetheless joined the mayhem and ran through ” the pillow gauntlet” unprotected. Like those standing on the platforms had done for the homeless man who walked through the tunnel before us with his shopping cart, they took it easy on our unprotected heads.
The pillow fight is old-fashioned, spontaneous fun powered on endorphins released from scampering, dodging, and swinging, rather than, for instance, drugs and alcohol which feed the fun for other events attended by many people of this age on a weekend in the city. It’s more than just feathers and guffawing, though. The pillow fight is an opportunity for strangers to engage one another in a healthy, fun activity at no charge; to meet each other, to cavort together, to appreciate the city of San Francisco for its quirky impulsiveness together.
Long before reading this morning’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled, “Days of being soft on pillow fight over”, I considered the costs of clean-up and the consequences of having thousands of people congregate in a public space. And though we didn’t contribute to the inches of feathers stacking up in the plaza, I worried what the costs were and who paid for it. This morning’s article quoted Mohammad Nuru, deputy director of the Department of Public Works, who said city officials “are trying to determine the organizers of the annual Valentine’s Day flash-mob-esque event to have them pay the $35,000 tab for cleaning up the last two years’ events.”
According to the article, 38 city workers had to cleanup after our fun. At the price of $17,500 per event, each one of those workers was paid about $461. If they were paid $25/hour, a very high and thus conservative estimate, that would mean they spent over 18 hours each cleaning up. This is an extortionate price for a small plaza and the streets that lead towards it, and organizers (if there were any; the consensus at the fight was that this is a grassroots, spontaneous event) should not be held responsible for a price and terms that the Department of Public Works determined.
The Department of Public Works also wants organizers to “apply for a permit and provide cleanup, security, and portable toilets.” Unlike a concert that has a duration of several hours and requires these provisions, pillow fight participants can stay for as short a time as they like and then disburse, hopefully able to use the facilities of shops or restaurants as they do so. When tourists explore the city on foot, it is expected that they will be an added burden to the facilities of nearby businesses, why not offer the same courtesy to San Francisco residents looking for innocent, community-building fun?
The pillow fight is one example of the unique San Francisco culture; something that, if litter and expenditure could be minimized, is worth its costs. But, if the San Francisco community decides that having these kinds of events, comparable to fireworks exploded in Chinatown or litter left on streets after parades, are too costly, there are other alternatives. Why not provide brooms and ask that participants sweep up some feathers before departing? Or why not recruit volunteers for the next morning?
As for security, the article did not mention any injuries or damages (which, given its tone, would have taken the opportunity if any existed) nor did I observe any. To ask “organizers” to foot the bill for a permit, security, and toilets is exorbitant and would surely kill the grassroots event.
Part of the beauty of the pillow fight was its non-regulated spontaneity. It may be a necessary evil to bring bureaucracy and politics into the event by implementing measures to ensure the event gets cleaned up, such as having designated organizers who recruit volunteers to clean up afterwards. In our economic climate where politicians jump to the conclusion of budget cuts before compromise or alternatives, it is sad to see that the victim will be harmless fun and community-building events like the Great San Francisco Pillow Fight. It is time for compromise.
At long last, my very first tulip ascended from the earth today. In my adult life, I have never been in one place long enough to complete the four seasons, to experience the earth as it changes from one vantage point, or to nurture something to life over its natural and necessary course of time. The first growth from my tulip patch marks a departure from that unfortunate circumstance.
A post about tulips might evoke a snicker; perhaps the natural occurrence of new life and new growth is considered banal among the lightening speed of new technology. At times it feels like the world has accelerated to such a pace that we forget the beauty and profundity of what is natural.
Or at least I almost did.
For the past few years, I have spent much of my time in large metropolises: primarily Los Angeles, Rome, and Washington, DC. In the paved, pruned, tidy, gridded box that is Los Angeles, it is easy to live an entire year without realizing the diversity of earth’s seasons or understand the importance of its changes. With little weather variation, limited rainfall, and far more freeways than trees, the natural world in cities is often choked by smog or development and relegated to a two-square mile corner of the grid.
Back in the wine country, nature abounds. I can see the stars–bright and now forming meaningful constellations; I can hear animal life–crickets, owls, and coyotes. There is evidence all around that we are now in the deep of the winter season.
Reflecting on this, perhaps the significance of a post about tulips makes more sense. It is profound to realize and appreciate feeling like one life-form in a web of many creatures. It is invigorating to feel the world as it undergoes change and to be a part of it, even if it is planting 19 bulbs in a rusty wheelbarrow.
The American dream is a beautiful and terrible thing. The American mantra that with hard work any person can attain any success in this country, while inspiring and anecdotally true, is not the reality.
I want to believe that every person born in this “land of the free” is equal and has equal opportunities. I want to believe that no matter the circumstances of one’s birth or the poverty of one’s upbringing, that the United States gives people of every race the same opportunities to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Evidence shows that this is not the case.
After Eric Holder, the first African American to head the U.S. Justice Department, gave a speech encouraging Americans to have frank conversations about race, Boston Globe Columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote a scathing article that called Holder’s logic backward.
Jacoby wrote:
“What justifies Holder’s belief that the only way to surmount them is to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us? He has it exactly backward. Harping on old grievances, constantly revisiting past resentments, relentlessly picking at scabs – those are a recipe not for social harmony but for never-ending antagonism.”
I would like to give Jacoby the benefit of the doubt. As I do, Jacoby believes in this country. But to preach the American dream without considering its validity is to deprecate that which this country has achieved and can achieve. To settle for current disparities and claim, with blind optimism, that we have achieved that dream is to compromise. Where Jacoby and I differ is in his willingness to compromise. It is easier to do so when you are comfortable and unexposed to or unscathed by the lingering destruction caused by racism.
There are numerous examples of continuing racial injustice, and I will only mention one. Graduate students at New York University in the “Reporting the Nation” program reported on uranium contamination in the water on the Diné, or Navajo, Indian reservation. People are essentially drinking radiation. In the piece titled “The Forgotten Navajo: Uraniam contamination” these students reported the disease-riddled reality of these impoverished Native people. The United States government didn’t just relocate Native people to reservations where they lived independently and prospered. As a result of this “Native Solution,” people are dying.
And yet, Jacoby denies that we need to have a discussion about the consequences of racism in this country.
Please listen here to Janice Pryor’s WUMB (Boston) radio interview of Robette Dias, Co-Director of Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing and Training as they discuss why we still need to talk about race-including a discussion of the United States’ cruel colonialist history.
Jacoby calls talking about race picking scabs. What he wants is to accept a band-aid on racism without healing the wound. Anti-racism work does mean exposing wounds, removing the band-aids and finding methods of better medicine. Only with this exposure can progress be made; if left ignored, the wound will only leave a deeper scar.
Benziger works closely with the earth, and that characterizes the juice. Though I am working in the marketing department (so I am not romping through vineyards or plucking grapes from vines nearly as often as those who manage the ranch), I receive plenty of reminders from co-workers of the importance to feel connected with this place (this terroir in the wine world). Typing at a computer or working on the internet for too long could potentially distract from that connection, but a walk amongst the vines brings me back to reality. The reality is that our wines are not just a product, this land is not a factory, and even our branding is not just words.
Below are a few of the pictures I have had the opportunity to take on my strolls through Benziger’s Sonoma Mountain Estate. These and others are also archived under The Clarity Post’s “Photo Archive” page.
Every year it is a little different, and yet it remains unchanged.
In my family, it is tradition to attend the annual Indigenous Peoples’ Thanksgiving Day Sunrise Ceremony on Alcatraz Island to greet the sun, give thanks, and come together as Native people. This year, like last year, my well-bundled family, thousands of people, and I gathered around a fire, listened to speeches, and watched the beautiful Aztec dancers (see clip below). Over the course of the last 365 days, there have been changes: Indian Joe, who has played “taps” on the trumpet every year on Alcatraz that I can remember, died this year.
Another difference was an appearance and statement by Kathy Peltier, the daughter of Leonard Peltier who is serving two life sentences for the alleged murder of two FBI agents. Though the fairness of his trial and his conviction have come under scrutiny, this activist in the American Indian Movement remains behind bars. Kathy Peltier asked those present for their support and for letters to her father “to show that you’re still out there.” Her anguish was tangible; it felt almost as if her appearance was a swan song–a desperate call for help. I thought about my father, who is the same age as hers, and, in the spirit of the day, I gave thanks.
But, the same struggles remain unwon, just as before. As I watched the rising sun warming the aged, peeling skeleton of the former penitentiary, I noticed the group of park rangers lurking on the island’s higher plateau.
We go to Alcatraz for those moments of connectedness: to embrace the struggles of Native people, to tap our feet to the rhythms of the drums, to savor the power in the songs. But those are just moments in a larger scheme supervised by federal park rangers and encroached upon by 21st century politics. This day on “The Rock” is supposed to be an opportunity for Native people to gather as a community, yet in many ways it exemplifies the cornering of Native people by societal symbolization and the U.S. government. These rangers, and heavily armed private security forces like the man below, detract from the sense of community the event tries to build.
The Indian Treaty Council has to obtain permission from the federal park service to use Alcatraz Island each year and the latter allows it providing they can send handfuls of security forces to ensure that the Indians play nice and don’t try to occupy the land (that was once theirs) again. As Bill Means said in his speech this Thanksgiving:
“Alcatraz should be honored as a sacred site by the federal government. Indigenous people have a right to be here. And Indigenous people have a right to be who we are.”
Another 365 days later, and the government has not given Alcatraz recognition as a sacred site, and Indigenous people are still being corralled across this tourist attraction.
I lament the paucity of those moments of connection and community not only because of the lurking security; there is another force exacerbating the role society has assigned to Native people. Just like last year, I spent my few hours on Alcatraz shoulder to shoulder with many strangers (excepting my own family) who held up their video cameras and cameras, chatted during the ceremony, and led their children around as if they were at a museum. It seems as though every year the population of visitors to The Rock who attend to see “a piece of history” grows, as if Native tradition is another artifact of a bygone era to encase in glass and label. The relegation of tradition to museums is not analogous to revering of history. I appreciate non-Native visitors who come to show solidarity with Native people, but often it is difficult to spot them among the crowd of people video-recording and using flash photography during ceremonies and sacred dances.* Like taking photographs in a church, this act of disrespect is so rampant that leaders of prayer have to pause to beg the crowd to desist.
And so, this year I wondered, as I did last year, how many people in attendance really heard the message? How many took it home with them? How many thought about it as they sat around their Thanksgiving tables, and how many just went on with their lives telling the fallacious tale of peaceful Indians and pilgrims?
After the ceremony, on the boat back to San Francisco, a group of Eagle Nation drummers resumed their singing and drumming. Even as the announcement blared over the loudspeaker not to deface the boat and the reminder that it is federal property, the drummers drowned out the mechanical voice with their music (see clip below). On or off The Rock, whole or fragmented, we gathered around them anew as the sound reverberated so loudly in the small space that it was indistinguishable from my own heartbeat.
The Native people on Alcatraz broadcast internationally over the radio and internet. We have cell phones and play acoustic guitars. Bluntly put, we’re not just a textbook excerpt or a people encapsulated in formaldehyde. And, I will cherish my annual visit to Alcatraz for those transient moments when we feel like a people gathered together, even if I have to stand by an armed guard and have my prayers interrupted by a camera’s blinding flash.
*Author’s note: the material recorded/photographed was done so with explicit permission from the Indian Treaty Council and was not done during any ceremony or sacred portions of this day.
As I was out of the United States for a few months while funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were distributed state-by-state, I wondered if there would be tangible changes when I returned home.
California, owing in part to its massive economy and population, is to receive the second-most generous portion of the ARRO’s funding (after Washington state). According to Recovery.gov, the website that self identifies as providing transparency on ARRO, California was given 807 awards for a total of $1,118,930,405 in grants, loans, and contracts and 2240.05 jobs. I do pity the Californian who receives the odd mathematical remainder of .05 of his new job. Of course, most of the stimulus money has not reached its destination: loans have not been disbursed, projects are stalled, and grants remain unfulfilled promises.
But, upon returning home, it was almost immediately evident that some of the ARRO funds had made it right here in my home town. The first indication was the major road construction near the center of Sonoma. Ostentatious signs surrounding the site advertise that the project is “putting America to work” and was made possible by the ARRO (see below).
I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with giving credit where credit is due. I wondered how the palpable results I see in my neighborhood were reflected on Recovery.gov. I searched by my zipcode and found that Sonoma has received over ten million dollars: $7,837,601 in contracts, $730,863 in grants, and $1,939,340 in loans.
Right here in my home town, recipients include the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center, and the City of Sonoma itself. While delays in fund distribution are frustrating, and California’s unemployment rate of 12% is high even in a national context, it is reassuring that recipients are organizations in my community with which I am familiar and infrastructure I use on a regular basis.
So, each time I drive over my new smooth road surface with clearly delineated boundaries and markings, I thank Congress, President Obama, and the American taxpayer.
Every day, headlines, statistics and my own parents tell me that I chose the exact wrong time to graduate from college. In our anorexic economic climate with scarce job opportunities, the number of graduates with an appetite for postgraduate study has burgeoned. Even before the economy tumbled and naysayers negated the prospects of my generation, I knew I wanted to pursue higher education.
We foot soldiers in the army of the recently graduated thought our greatest nemesis was the economy, but now we face a more belligerent foe: the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, and its comrades. The ETS is a private company in New Jersey that makes 150 bucks a pop for every Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, administered. It robs you of another 50 dollars if you have to change your test date, time, or location—something you may need to do since you have to register so far in advance. In the 2008 fiscal year, ETS made over 850 million dollars off of us, and that was prior to the economic downturn’s apex and my fellow graduates and I returning to the nest.
It’s not just ETS profiting off our dreams of higher education. GRE test preparation programs like Kaplan and the Princeton Review charge college graduates thousands of dollars to be drilled in mathematics we haven’t seen since middle school and to memorize vocabulary terms. These preparation programs exemplify the socio-economic barriers to higher education. I knew I was bankrupting the tenets of my social consciousness—and my dwindling savings account—when I spent $400 and 18 hours last weekend learning how to take this test. The pace was excruciating and the instructor was apathetic; I sulked back to my parents’ house wishing I’d saved my money and used solely my 22-dollar GRE book.
Furthermore, I cannot think of a postgraduate program that would find its perfect class by knowing which of its applicants is better at reducing fractions and finding antonyms.
Not only was I injudicious enough to shell out 150 dollars to a service I believe to be unjust, I was seduced by the allure of a preparation program’s promise. But what are we with educational goals to do? My education means everything to me, and it seems the only way to persevere towards my Masters degree is to navigate the loot-ridden route of an exploitive system. So far, what I’ve learned from graduate school is that one has to sell out to get there: financially and, worst of all, morally.
