Editorials

Democracy and its Discontents By BECKY O'MALLEY Editorial

Friday January 14, 2005

Democracy in action can be pretty disappointing. It hardly seems like four years ago that a few hardy souls from greater Berkeley rounded up our raggedy old winter clothes and jumped on a Southwest flight to Washington to protest George W. Bush’s usurpation of the presidency when he’d clearly lost the 2000 election. While we were there, we thought we were making a brave showing with our clever banners, even though the weather was abominable. Much to our chagrin, when we got home we discovered that no one who’d been watching the televised inauguration had seen us, or even heard about the protest. When we saw Fahrenheit 9-11 this year, many in the theater were surprised to see the 2000 inaugural protest footage which Michael Moore included, since it never made it to home TV. 

We didn’t know then how much worse things were going to get in this country during Bush’s reign. We didn’t imagine anything like the USA Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq or Abu Ghraib. And we aren’t going to protest this inauguration, because we know it won’t do much good. Many believe this election was stolen, but few think that protests will change the result. 

Even here in Berkeley, a city that voted 90 percent against Bush, democracy continues to have its disappointments. This week’s e-mail has been full of angry protests from citizens who worked for years to produce Berkeley’s latest General Plan and the Downtown Plan that preceded it. They believe, and rightly so, that the huge Seagate luxury condominium complex which has been approved for Addison Street directly violates the policies which were painfully hammered out when those plans were adopted. They say that the purportedly factual representations made by city staff to support the developer are fraught with deliberate deception. Even worse, they’re pretty sure, after last Tuesday’s council meeting, that the elected councilmembers, both old and new (with the exception of Dona Spring), will be turning a blind eye to the irregularities in the process by which the building was approved. It’s the Gaia Building all over again: bonus floors allocated for faux art space and sub-par affordable units—a winning formula. Without, of course, the environmental review supposedly mandated by the California Environmental Quality Act. And the mayor and councilmembers, some of whom voted to approve Gaia, frankly don’t give a damn. They’re expected to reject Friends of Downtown Berkeley’s appeal to the Zoning Adjustment Board’s decision next Tuesday. Citizens who have participated in the planning process in good faith are deeply discouraged to see yet again that the City of Berkeley Department of Planning and Development can ignore both the law and democratically decided public policy and get away with it.  

We’d like to believe that in a democracy the power of the press to reveal the truth will make us free. But we know better. The irregularities in the national election, the last one and this one, have been revealed, even in the last-to-get-the-word mainstream press. The shenanigans which built Gaia have been well documented, at least in the Planet, both under the present owners and in the previous incarnation. But the same things happen again and again.  

The courts, although much weakened by the Supreme Court’s shameful performance in the last presidential election, still hold out a bit of hope. In Ohio right now the Green Party and others are trying a legal challenge to election law violations. Here in Berkeley, it’s becoming clear that the last remaining way to challenge the Planning Department’s continued flouting of law and policy will be a well-planned legal challenge, supported by enough funding to reach the appeals court, since trial courts rarely understand the California Environmental Quality Act. Such an effort, backed by the ACLU, defeated the most disgraceful parts of Berkeley’s anti-panhandling law which violated the First Amendment. That law was backed by some so-called progressives, including the current mayor, as well as by conservatives, but it was overturned in court nonetheless.  

Real progress, on any front, comes slowly if at all. The best part of our unsuccessful protest at the first Bush inauguration was hooking up with seven busloads of Detroit NAACP members who had ridden all night to get to Washington. We happened on their vociferous contingent by accident, after being disappointed earlier by the disorganized white liberals like us trying to get together at Dupont Circle. We were delighted to see the organization logos on their hats and sweatshirts, since we’d worked with the Detroit NAACP in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the ‘60s. I mentioned that to two fellow demonstrators, Joyce and Grace, 60-ish grandmothers like me, and we discovered that we'd all three marched down Woodward Avenue in Detroit with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963. They grabbed my arms, one on each side, and we formed a rousing if off-key trio singing old protest songs for the rest of the march. All of us, I think, were cheered on that nasty drizzly day by remembering the very real accomplishments of our generation. When we started out, housing and schools in Michigan were largely segregated, and at least now that's illegal, there and in most of the rest of the country.  

At the time of Dr. King’s birthday, we are reminded that it’s taken pretty much our whole adult lifetime, now approaching 50 years, and the lifetimes of many who preceded us, to achieve the modest goal of ending state-sponsored segregation in the United States. Not to achieve true integration, or full equality of opportunity, certainly not real affirmative action or reparations for past injustice—all of those challenges still lie ahead.  

And now we have another unjust war on our hands, and another dubious election. In the context of all these big problems, little things like trying to ensure democratic process even on the local level might seem trivial. But if democracy is to survive and thrive, it needs to be nurtured and protected, all the time and everywhere. Citizens have a right to expect that democratically enacted laws will be followed, even by the City of Berkeley.  

—Becky O’Malley 

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