Opinion

The citizens of Berkeley have shown, yet again, that they can’t be fooled by the army of lawyers and planners (including the local firm DCE) that the University of California has arrayed against them to support yet another grandiose expansion plan. Both City Hall and numerous individuals with sharp pencils and good educations (often courtesy of UC Berkeley) have dissected the environmental impact report supplied for the university’s long range development plan, and lambasted it both for what it contains and for what it doesn’t contain. What the report discloses is horrendous enough: many more square feet of building mass in undisclosed locations, accommodations for many more cars, and other manifestations of uncontrolled growth. But even worse is what it doesn’t disclose, for example the University’s plans for development of its toxic site at the former Richmond Field Station, rechristened Campus Bay for marketing purposes, and the future of Lawrence Berkeley Lab, dependent of course on whether the federal government decides to re-invest in UC management skills. -more-

News came over the weekend that Shirley Chisholm had died at 80. Obituaries quoted her chosen exit line, delivered as she left Washington after 14 years in Congress. “I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts,” she said. “That’s how I’d like to be remembered.” And that is indeed how we remember Shirley Chisholm, as a person who had the guts to do what she believed was right, regardless of what other people thought she should be doing. She was the first African-American woman in Congress, and is still the only African-American woman—and the only woman—to seek the presidential nomination of a major party. -more-

This week we got a voice mail message directed to the “editor-in-chief” from a woman asking us for a public apology for running a “Kwanzaa commentary” that was deeply offensive. She said that we should have known it would be offensive, and that the author “Mr. McGruder” should be fired. I couldn’t remember running any Kwanzaa commentary—for a moment I thought one could have slipped by me in the readers’ contribution issue we published on Christmas Eve. And we don’t have anyone named McGruder working for us. -more-