Saturday Night with the Alameda Progressives

Illustration by Gillain Dreher for the Alameda Magazine Article about our progressive island

    There are times when you learn so much by keeping your smartphone in your pocket!  Happened to me two weeks ago, at the vet, waiting my turn to pick up Clark's thyroid medication.  Rifling through the stack of mags intended to placate antsy pet owners, the cover of Alameda Magazine caught my eye with the teaser "No longer a political island."  Inside was an article by Steve Tavares about the new political complexion of my hometown. Our city council was the first in the Bay Area to call for Trump's impeachment, beating Berkeley to the punch.  Trump received only 13% of the 2016 vote, vs. 78% for Clinton.  And there has been a 4-1 majority on the council for progressive issues, including declaring Alameda a sanctuary city for the undocumented.

    Bernie Sanders' campaign was a catalyst for the island's leftward momentum, and the article mentions a group of "Berniecrats" called Alameda Progressives.  This led to a Google query, and in short order I had an invitation to party with the APs, on the evening of Saturday August 19, in a backyard on the west side.  Wouldn't miss it.

    The article had said an influx of young people was part of the reason for Alameda's move left, but many of the people at the party seemed to be '60s veterans like me.  A guy named me that he goes to Camp Winnarainbow every year, run by the iconic Wavy Gravy.  The hostess, an age-mate named Ruth, told me that the group has been holding a vigil at Park and Santa Clara, every Saturday between noon and 1 since inauguration day.  There was a large people earlier that day, seventy-five came to express their solidarity with Charlottesville.  Ruth said the best part was the opportunity to have unscripted interactions with onlookers.

    She's often heard people say "All lives matter," responding to the Black Lives Matter theme, and the comeback of one of the AP stalwarts is "If that were true I would not need to be here."  Would "especially yours and mine" work too? Marginalized whites were are the bedrock of Trump's support, and in my opinion progressives need to empathize.

Pamela Price, candidate for Alameda County DA
Ruth is the woman with the dog

    The gathering was addressed by Pamela Price, candidate for Alameda DA in the June 2018 election.  She is opposed to the death penalty and mass incarceration, and is trying to raise the 500K required to run a credible campaign.  She has my qualified support, and when we chatted about the devastating drug epidemic, she said that the alternatives to incarceration she promotes would be more effective than jail in helping addicts get clean.  Hope that's true — for many parents, Santa Rita is the rescue of last resort when their children are on a hard-drug death spiral.  In any event, I hope future flyers will emphasize both safer and drug-free communities.

Sharon Golden, Alameda Cannabis Community

   Sharon Golden (sharongolden3@gmail.com) of the AICC (Alameda Island Cannabis Community) was another noteworthy presence at the party.  One of the youth contingent, she wants to bring the cannabis industry to Alameda, the right way.  She explained why the industry belongs on the island — we're losing out on tax revenue, and creating bridge and tunnel traffic by forcing residents to drive to Oakland?  But she also wants including provisions in the licensing agreement that mandate local hires, and a $17 per hour minimum wage.

    As for me, my progressive dream is that low-lying Alameda, one of the communities that will be impacted first by sea-level rise, set an example in determined and creative responses to climate change.  An interactive map released just this month by the UCS (Union of Concerned Scientist) shows the island can expect by 2060/2080/2100 under moderate and severe sea-level rise projections. Choose the Chronic Inundation Area or Communities at Risk tab, drag and click on the right panel until you get a search box (can be at bit frustrating), and then enter Alameda CA as the place to look for.  Under the moderate projections, 10 to 25% of Alameda will be chronically inundated by 2080; by 2100, 25 to 50%.  (See also the San Jose Mercury article about the map.)  

    What is to be done?  As a cyclist, I would dearly love to see Alameda become bike friendlier.  Our big problem on that score is that there is only one bike path through the tunnel, and it's dirty and narrow; and the bike route across the Fruitvale Bridge to BART is dangerous and hard on times.  In the long run, the solution is to bring BART to the island. But that will take decades, and surely interim measures are possible.

Life is sweet

Charlie (BofA), Marv (BofA, and now CCSF),
and Lisa (met her and her husband Tristan folk dancing)

µ, Ted (BofA), and Oded (BofA)

    Saturday, August 12 witnessed the first party at Wood Street in nearly 4 years.  It was a total improvisation.  Original concept: need help with the orchard, so invite a couple of friends over to pick as much fruit as they wanted.  And then came "scope creep," as we called it at BofA wire transfer.  Of course I needed to include the Friday lunch gang, my dear old friends and colleagues from BofA.  And so of course I needed to offer comestibles besides apples and pears.  And of course other old friends should come too, and so on … until I had to stop because, of course, I was in over my head.

Charlie, Lisa, Ted, Nick (friend from '70s),
and Carol (new friend)

    If I invited them, would they come?  And if so would the guests enjoy themselves?  A dozen of us sat on the deck for hours, eating and drinking lustily, while conversation flowed richly.  My elder son Gabe gets much credit for the food, by coming early and rescuing my attempt at home fries.  Charlie, that pillar of the Friday lunch gang, brought a copy of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and we took turns reading the part where Willy and Linda Loman brainstorm Willy's end-of-career options.  May not sound like fun, considering the option Willy eventually picks, but we had a great time with it.

Nick and Charlie.  There weren't enough hats to go around,
so we had to get creative

    At first I'd thought Charlie brought the play as a bow to nostalgia.  In the old days, we had a little club at BofA called Radio Theater.  We would take weekly breaks from developing software for wholesale banking (massive $$ transfers) to read plays that often took a jaundiced view of ambition and riches — this is really true.  But Charlie was clearly interested in a revival, and some of the partygoers agreed to reconvene in September to read a Sam Shepard play.  Shepard, who passed at age 73 on July 31, was such a favorite of Radio Theater that we read three of his works: True West, Tooth of Crime, and Curse of the Starving Class.  It only seems right that we begin a new season with another.

    The occasion was shadowed by a sinister rumor — summer ends in August.  That rumor is true: the F'17 semester at CCSF starts the 21st, same day as the

More hat creativity

solar eclipse — the first act of the prof/TA routine Marv and I have been honing is scheduled to debut at an Introduction to Java class at 3:10 pm. But at Wood Street that Saturday, summer was still going strong.  At one point the conversation threatened to drift toward the T-word, but for just this once we changed course.

    We picked bags of fruit instead, I showed off the glorious Wood st. Rain Garden, and the conversation wandered from literature to the plight of hearing impaired profs. (Unanimous, if unsolicited, advice to the host: tell the kids on 8/21 that

Tristan and Lisa's sons Theo and Milo,
picking apples in the orchard

you have this little problem).  And from there to gender politics in the classroom. The typical classroom speaking voice of a female CCSF students is so soft, even when providing the correct answer, that a prof with normal hearing could be forgiven for overlooking them.  Why would that be, in 2017, in enlightened San Francisco?  In Carol's opinion, it's because girls still lack suitable role models.  She spoke from her experience growing up in Port Arthur, Texas (like Janis Joplin), when girls had no prospects for refinery jobs, let alone college.  Her two brother did get refinery job, and worked their way into R ? D without college degrees, while Carol somehow found her way to a Master's in zoology from UT Austin.

    And of course we also talked about our kids and ourselves.  Turns out that Nick, like Carol, was the first person in his family to get a college degree, and

The lads with their dad Tristan

was actually the valedictorian at his working class Italian Chicago high school. Tristan plans to complete his zoology dissertation in December, on wild life corridors in East Africa.  Ted's son Noah is looking at colleges, and Charlie's daughter Guille is starting med school. (Time does fly: knew them both from before they they had children).  Gabe is engaged in important writing projects.  And I was delighted to have them in my life and let the summer moments expand.  Sometimes you've just got break down and admit it, life can be so sweet.
   

The Rain Garden, drought tolerants on the rim, bog lovers in the basin