The Politics of Power

CALIFORNIA HAS been hit hard by the recession. It has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation and a $26 billion unresolved budget deficit. Private businesses and public agencies throughout the state are making painful spending cuts and layoffs.
In Contra Costa County [and in the City of Oakland,] public employee unions demonstrated leadership by agreeing to a frugal contract with no pay increases and significant benefit cuts, which preserved jobs and basic services. "
This was the Editorial in the Contra Costa Times newspaper of July 16, 2009.

I agree with the conclusion. but I have two other reasons why I also recommend approval of a contract.
1. The strike is unthinkable, at this delicate time, one side is willing to push to the brink and the other is faced with a dilemma, "Do we really want to drive off the cliff and take the Bay Area, the state and, possibly, the nation off to the unknown abyss of a "Double Dip Recession"?
2. There is another option: "Agree, for now, but Remember!" Repeat your arguments to the voters at the next Board Election and let us decide. "They" have shown their cards, you show yours and you will save the Bay Area and, I really believe, the nation.
At worse, BART Officials will see the personal risk and THAT is the biggest motivator. It directly answers the juvenile, question "What's In It for ME?"
On the other hand, they have shown their incompetence or malfeacance in the way then handled voters in three BART Board Hearings on: "The Oakland Airport Connector (OAC)."
So many objected to the project the first meeting, many were turned away and they had to repeat the hearings and double the space which, still, proved inadequate. The opposition was over 80 Percent. The extra room, where I sat, had no audio or visual feed from the main hall. They either did not want for us to hear other objections or wanted to keep us from hearing what BART Board members had to say in support, later I wonder about other possibilities, i.e., were they awake?
To them, we did not matter, we were in "the back of the bus", again! But, I managed to get back to the main "Hearing Room" and watched the painful look on each of the Board Members who never spoke and looked as if they were wondering what did they do in their childhood to desserve such a cruel and unusual punishment.
It made me recall an old practice in Mexico, where the official appointed by the Viceroy, who was a representative of the Spanish King, held "Audiencias" where "indians" (from India?) came and bowed deeply and even kissed the hand of The Lord and handed a "Petition", with the proper gold coins, handed over to a servant, to keep "The Lord" from the unwashed coins. I had a written petition but included no coins.
Then I noticed that the names of did not match the sleepy heads behind the name. Some were "substitute players". His Lordship did not have to bother with the people's complaints.
I will skip repeating lies and deceptions used to get the Oakland Airport Connector approved except to mention that for over 35 years they have promised, in fact the promise switched a Contra Costa County vote that brought BART into existance. The promise was for an extension to Antioch and they always said that it was too expensive at "$100 Million per mile" which they later changed to $450 Million. They often said, "we don't have the money", yet, out of nowhere they have an urgent need to spend $400, $450 or $522 Million in Oakland' three mile bridge to OAK Airport, before the only one tenant left is Southwest Airline. This is the future in a "Hub and Spoke" airline network, it seems they are unaware that the Airline business, airplanes and route patterns change ALL the time. In the last "25 years", a BART Official said in a KCBS radio interview: "we have been working on this project, very hard, for the last 25 years". And, evidently, they still think its a good idea!
Do you know any technical idea that is 25 years old is still worth buying or constructing? Even songs and singers go out style in less than 25 years -or die.

They never mention that the traffic in Oakland Airport has been going down, EVERY YEAR, for the last 7 years. All traffic gains in the last 7 years are gone!Yet, the BART people have the audacity to say they expect the number of riders per year to exceed the highest number ever used BART to SFO Airport which has Boeing 747, 777 and 767 and the Aerospatiale A380 with 535 passengers, and A330 arrivals from the Middle East.
While the BART Directors collect, allegedly, $300K per year in Total Compensation. Yes, I know, it looks like an arrogant display of power. Did the contract offer include proportional cuts in THEIR total compensations?
High BART Officials must have limo service, otherwise they would know how increasingly jerky BART trains are becoming (an official told me the driver has nothing to do with that, did she mean it's only a computer "glitch"? A design "glitch"? They will never fix?). Recently a train shook a part off and closed the Trans Bay Tunnel 45 minutes. Did they fix the problem to keep it from getting worse? I didn't think so.

A Signifiant Oversight Corrected

SULLIVAN´S ISLAND, S.C. Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel "Beloved", which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history. "There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby", Ms. Morrison said in a 1989 magazine interview. "There is no 300-foot tower, there is no small bench by the road."

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Anne McQuary for The New York Times

For those who survived the Middle Passage and those who didn´t: Toni Morrison on her bench on Sullivan´s Island, S.C.

This weekend, on Sullivan´s Island, off the South Carolina coast, Ms. Morrison, the Nobel laureate, and some 300 people held a memorial ceremony to dedicate her long-awaited “bench by the road.” The crowd included members of the Toni Morrison Society, National Park Service rangers, Ms. Morrison´s friends and family, and people from Charleston and nearby areas. They gathered Saturday afternoon under a blazing sun, accompanied by the rhythms of African drums, for a service that included the pouring of libations and a daisy wreath cast into the water to remember their ancestors.

"It´s never too late to honor the dead", said Ms. Morrison, 77, the author of eight novels, as she sat down on the 6-foot-long, 26-inch-deep black steel bench facing the Intracoastal Waterway. "It´s never too late to applaud the living who do them honor", she said. "This is extremely moving to me."

Sullivan’s Island, home to Fort Moultrie, was a point of entry into North America for about 40 percent of the millions of Africans who were enslaved in this country. Carlin Timmons, a park ranger, said that all the estimates were rough, but that historians believe 12 million to 15 million Africans came to the Americas and the Caribbean. Of those 4 to 10 percent were brought to North America.

The bench was secured by the National Park Service, which laid the foundation that included a bronze plaque explaining its significance. It was the first entry in the "Bench by the Road" project, created by the Toni Morrison Society, a nonprofit group of scholars and readers dedicated to examining Ms. Morrison´s work. The society, which was also holding a conference in nearby Charleston, plans in the next five years to call on individuals, corporations and community groups to help them place benches at 10 sites.

The spots under consideration have significance in Ms. Morrison´s novels and in black history. They include Fifth Avenue in Harlem, where the Silent Parade protesting the East St. Louis, Ill., riots was held in 1917 (featured in the novel "Jazz" and the site of Emmett Till´s 1955 murder in Mississippi, which helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

"We have come back to the place we started from", Carolyn C. Denard, a founder and the board chairwoman of the Toni Morrison Society, told the audience sitting under a big white tent, some furiously fanning themselves. Dr. Denard, a dean at Brown University, said groups like the Carolina Committee on Remembrance helped with the project.

At its founding in 1993 the society adopted as its motto "a bench by the road", based on Ms. Morrison´s comments in the 1989 article in World, the magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association. On Saturday part of that interview was read, along with a passage from "Beloved", which calls on black people to love one another in the face of oppression and brutality.

"When I wrote those words that they read, I was just reminiscing about the necessity for literature, the necessity for African-Americans to make their own art in their own words," Ms. Morrison said in an interview after the ceremony.

One of her favorite sites for a bench would be in Oberlin, Ohio, a stop on the Underground Railroad near her hometown of Lorain, she said. While a number of museums dedicated to black history have sprung up around the country since 1989, as well as much new scholarship about black history Ms. Morrison said she liked the idea of an “unpretentious” bench for its simplicity and accessibility.

“Well, the bench is welcoming, open,” she said. “You can be illiterate and sit on the bench, you can be a wanderer or you can be on a search.”

And that search is for anyone, not just black people, she added. If anything, with all the talk about race in this year of Senator Barack Obama’s historic candidacy, Ms. Morrison said, she would like to see white people hold a conversation among themselves about the legacy of slavery.

"African-Americans don´t own slavery," Ms. Morrison said. "It´s not a brand because there were slave masters and there were abolitionists and there were other people who died to see to it that justice was done."

But before there is reconciliation or healing, there needs to be a better acknowledgment of the past, said many of the participants in Saturday´s ceremony and the society´s conference. That meeting´s theme was "Modernism," with scholarly sessions like "Tar Baby´s and Global Capitalism" and "A Modernist Look at Milkman and Hagar in Morrison´s "Song of Solomon."

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Anne McQuary for The New York Times

A plaque on the bench created by the Toni Morrison Society.

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Times Topics: Toni Morrison

Thomalind Polite, a 34-year-old speech therapist from Charleston who helped Ms. Morrison throw the wreath into the water, said she came to honor her seventh-generation ancestor Mrs. Polite’s distant relative, whose name was Priscilla, was 10 when she was stolen from Sierra Leone in 1756 and brought to Sullivan’s Island, Mrs. Polite said. She wiped away a tear as she held the hand of her 6-year-old daughter, Faith.

"I feel like a circle closed," Mrs. Polite said of the ceremony to honor Priscilla and the mostly nameless, faceless people who came to the island, surviving the Middle Passage, the brutal trans-Atlantic journey from West Africa. "She´s finally getting the honor she deserves."

By next summer an exhibition on the African presence is planned for the visitor´s center in Fort Moultrie, said Michael Allen, an education specialist with the National Park Service. He noted that the first plaque commemorating Africans like Priscilla was placed in 1999, the money raised by, among others, graduates of black high schools in Charleston.

Mr. Allen spoke to the audience about the lives of those Africans. They were quarantined in so-called “pest houses” on Sullivan´s Island "long torn down" before they were sold into slavery. Many in the crowd wept as they read the plaque on the ground, which says that the bench honors the memory of enslaved Africans who arrived on Sullivan´s Island and of those who died during the Middle Passage. It concludes, "Nearly half of all African- Americans have ancestors who passed through Sullivan´s Island."

On Friday night Ms. Morrison treated conference attendees to a reading from her ninth novel, "A Mercy", to be published in November by Alfred A. Knopf. In the late 17th century a slave mother has given up her daughter Florens to an Anglo-Dutch trader as partial payment for a debt from a Maryland plantation owner.

Ms. Morrison said in the interview that the novel was her chance to uncouple notions about race from the experience of slavery. Many white indentured servants had an experience that was not so different from that of the enslaved Africans, she said.

"There is a certain history that the historians know about and artists, I think, know less about", Ms. Morrison said.

"There is no topic on anybody´s table which does not involve black people", she continued, mentioning education and health care. "And when that disappears in time, then they have to do what they have been avoiding, which is talk about poor people."

Teapot Tempest On Pride

Mrs. Obama was taken to task for saying "I am now proud of my country..." or "I have never been more proud of my country... ",
I think others expected her to say "I am now more proud of my country than I have ever been..." which many have said, hopefully, many times before. Each time, we assume, for a reason that is more significant than any previous one.
So, why the big fuzz? Just political noise meant to distract.

Another reason why we can all, together, say "I am now more proud of my country than I have ever been..." was in the New York Times:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UnboundedEducation/message/694