Features

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AN OPEN LETTER TO CHANCELLOR BIRGENEAU 

Dear Mr. Chancellor, 

I recently got a letter from you asking for some money. I knew the campus had budget troubles, but I kind of thought you might throw some of that $200,000-plus salary you get into the pot before you came to me, since despite being a graduate and all, I still don’t make much. 

I wanted to ask you about that and about cutting the trees in People’s Park. We have these traditions there, which, being new and from Canada and all, I figure you might not know about, and I thought I better tell you. 

We try to show a little respect for other people and trees and stuff, and check in before we do anything dramatic like cutting down a tree. It’s not that hard to write a letter or post a poster or have a meeting or something, and it’s a good way to avoid riots. 

Anyhow, maybe you wanted to start a riot and I’m way off base. I just wanted you to know that if you, like all the other chancellors, want to put your mark on People’s Park, you don’t have to cut down trees to do it. 

Come on up and help build a bench with the salvaged wood from the tree, for instance. I think that would be a really nice gesture, or at least don’t arrest the rest of us when we go ahead without you. But don’t be afraid to join us, we’re kind of a nice bunch. And next time you get an urge to cut down a tree, please first give me a call. 

Carol Denney 

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OPEN LETTER TO BERKELEY HONDA 

To the owners and management of Berkeley Honda: 

I hope it’s becoming abundantly clear to you that you brought your management style to the wrong city. In Berkeley, we don’t give up easily on an institution that we’ve come to respect over the years—one that has given us excellent service. And we will not support any group or individual who attempts to deprive us of that service. Consequently, until you come to the table honestly and are willing to bargain fairly, we will continue to picket and make our voices heard, loudly. And we will take our business elsewhere. 

You will find us patient to the point of stubbornness. 

George Crowe 

A former patron of Doten Honda 

BHS ACCOUNTABILITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

For years Berkeley High School has struggled with “how to institute accountability.” Now that the new administrative and governance structure has been designed and the whole debate about small schools vs. large schools has been decided, can we finally get real about accountability? 

What is the process of resolving a concern/complaint about a teacher’s methods, practices or actions? I have been informed by the administrations that Principal Slemp wants all concerns taken up directly with the classroom teacher. 

While there are some issues best resolved at this level, problems regarding the teacher’s ability to deliver curriculum can only be addressed by their supervisors. It is the responsibility of administrators to evaluate, monitor, mentor, train, and sanction their teaching staff. Expecting students and parents to do this job does nothing to improve the dysfunctional aspects and educational inequity that still occur at BHS. 

I would like to hear a clear policy from our principal as to how the administration monitors complaints and how they remedy problems. I hope the parent/student representative to the governing bodies make a thorough assessment of current practice and offer recommendations based on real experiences from the consumers of the system, the students/parents. Counselors can be a good resource as they have a clear picture of what is working and what is not. 

During the past several years of drama about “how to best educate,” there has been plenty of rhetoric and little development of systems of teacher accountability. During my last reading of the BUSD teacher’s contract it stated in bold text, “Teachers have a right to teach the curriculum as they see fit.” While state standards now dominate instruction, Berkeley has a history of staff independence and variation of materials covered within a similar class. This is a gap students can no longer afford. 

Laura Menard 

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TRAFFIC CIRCLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just returned from a two-week vacation to find a Public Notice for Traffic Circles that had been delivered to me during my absence. From it, I learned that yet another circle is planned for the intersection of Chestnut Street and Hearst Avenue. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why. To my knowledge, there haven’t been any traffic or pedestrian incidents at that intersection during the three years that I have lived in the neighborhood, and traffic proceeds through it in an orderly manner. If anything, a stop sign at the intersection of Chestnut and Berkeley Way would be appropriate to slow traffic that hurtles onto Chestnut from University Avenue, along with a size-limit notice for trucks proceeding west on Berkeley Way. Those factors regularly cause problems at that intersection. Otherwise, existing stop signs along Chestnut seem to do an effective job of keeping streets in the area safe.  

I also learned from the leaflet that the city proposes to encourage planting trees within the circles (many of which can be expected to add debris to the roadway). That, I fear, will raise the probability of accidents by seriously restricting visibility of oncoming traffic. I have already experienced the problem of trying to see where oncoming traffic intends to proceed at various circles, and am concerned about being forced to drive in the bicycle lane on Hearst in order to circumnavigate a circle there. In no case have I experienced or observed others experiencing any need to slow down in the blocks between circles. Rather, they create confusion and hazard where none previously existed.  

Lastly, the leaflet informs me that “[t]he neighborhood will plant and maintain the plants. The circles will not have irrigation systems.” Under what compulsion am I or anyone else in my neighborhood to undertake such an enterprise? No one consulted me or anyone that I know about our being either willing or able to be responsible for doing that.  

As far as I can discern, the new traffic circles are a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and a looming disaster for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists. Whose bright idea was it to put them in anyway, and why? Can they be stopped?  

Nicola M. Bourne 

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“UNDER GOD” 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our pledge of allegiance used to have, “one nation indivisible,” which was changed to “one nation under God” in the 1950s. The country is divided now. Conservatives (who are really reactionaries), liberals, progressives, fundamentalist Christians, pro and anti-Iraq war activists .... We are separated down the middle. 

I suggest that we go back to being less divisible than we have become “under God.” 

Harry Gans 

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NATIONAL GUARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I speak for many when I tell you how deeply disappointed we are that the Berkeley Daily Planet did not cover to any meaningful extent the adoption of the Resolution to Bring Home Our Guard from Iraq Immediately by the Berkeley City Council on Sept. 13. 

We would expect a full report when our City Council takes action on something so vital and important to the ending of this war in Iraq, and so extremely timely and necessary to the protection and well-being of Californians, as bringing home our Guard. 

It has been made too painfully clear after Hurricane Katrina the price our citizens‚ pay when our Guard and our equipment is not around to do the job they signed up to do—assist citizens in times of emergencies. 

The warning from FEMA in the beginning of 2001 should be what we heed these days: not the fear tactics of our president who needs our Guard and Reservists to supply 45 percent of his fighting forces in Iraq. This warning alone should make all of us in California insist that our Guard be returned immediately. 

And the movement that is swelling in California to return the Guard, with Berkeley City Council once again in the vanguard, should be front-page news in our local paper. 

Suzanne Joi 

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PULLING STRINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

City government needs to be weeded out of highly paid lazy bureaucrats. There are more highly paid bureaucrats in the City of Berkeley than other city governments in the Bay Area. Library Director Jackie Griffith wants to lay off low-level workers and create more highly paid high-level bureaucrat jobs—padding and insulating herself by hiring loyal supporters and overpaying them. They sure are not going to be standing there checking and shelving books, so what are they going to do? You can’t have all chiefs and no Indians. The city government has too many corrupt individuals moving into key positions now. 

Capitelli, Wozniak and Olds live in districts with strong UC/LBNL constituencies. Maio worked at and is now retired from LBNL and has refused to recuse herself from voting on LBNL issues where she nearly always votes in their favor. She is Bates’ poodle. 

Max Anderson and Darryl Moore are mysteries to me—but they sort of go along with the bully boy Bates. Darryl has some disgusting alliance with Wozniak, the smirking monkeys who sit side by side at the council meetings and constantly turn to each other smirking and throwing their heads back. 

Through the physical violence, verbal abuse, and dirty politics on the environmental commission, I got a very good idea of who and how UC/LBNL is pulling the strings on the commission and on the city council. 

Wozniak kicked a chair into the back of a citizen Barbara George at a public meeting on UC property and she ended up in the hospital. The UC cop said he saw nothing and LA Wood caught Wozniak on tape with a demonic grin. Betty Olds appointed someone named Krumme to the commission and he kicked a Peace and Justice Commissioner (my boyfriend) in a wheelchair taping my presentation on radiation as Krumme stormed out the door. He returned and angered a black woman from Richmond so much by denying that dioxins are a health risk that she stood up and started hollering at him for ten minutes. The very next day Betty Olds walked by me in City Hall and gave me a sickly sweet simpering smile.  

Many many other horrible things have been perpetrated by the UC/LBNL faction and then they blame us for the bad behavior —including Arietta Chackos and the former City Manager Weldon Rucker. 

You are right, its time to fight back... if Cindy Sheehan can stand up to President Bush—in his own back yard (the rancher next door to Bush has just given Cindy 130 acres to use so she can “get closer to Bush”) then we can certainly stand up to what is going on here now in Berkeley... and it is primarily a major takeover of the town by UC and LBNL—facilitated by our “progressive Trojan Horse mayor. Thank god we have a great paper... what town has anything like the Berkeley Daily Planet?  

Leuren Moret 

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FIX THE LEVEES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to express my condolences to the people in New Orleans and the rest of the Deep South, who are suffering from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was seeing on TV, the water that is flooding New Orleans as a result of the levees breaking. 

One thing people should understand however is that the levees in New Orleans would have been prevented from breaking if the city of New Orleans had been given the funds from the federal government to fix the levees. However, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress had cut off the funding so that they can spend billions of dollars on the so-called war in Iraq instead of domestic priorities such as fixing the levees. 

By cutting off funding to fix the levees, President Bush and the Congress should be held accountable for the deadly flooding in New Orleans. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland 

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KPFA’S SCHEDULE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a pretty regular listener to KPFA, and have been for about six years now. I especially listen to three programs: “Democracy Now!” at 6 a.m. when I am getting up and getting my kids off to school and me to work, “Sunday Salon” on Sunday mornings, and the 6 p.m. news on most days. 

I don’t understand when so-called “peoples” or “democratic” groups who seem to use KPFA as their playpen for personal power games and political one-upmanship think they can intrude on listener habits and preferences, and as we’ve seen in a bunch of Daily Planet columns recently, pester the obviously professional and accomplished (and in my mind, indispensable) staff people who host these programs. 

Moving “Democracy Now” to another time is not putting it into what the power trippers around KPFA call “prime time.” I wouldn’t be able to hear it, for example. And I imagine even more people would miss it at 9 a.m. But the further point is: there doesn’t seem to have been any survey, outreach or discussion of the change, merely a cabal of “democratic” outsiders—some of them “elected” by the tiny minority of listeners who bother to vote in station elections. 

KPFA has enough problems without insider/outsider manipulations. Most of us listen to it for the programmers, not the background static of the endless pressure groups and power trippers who “democratically” continue to destabilize this precious resource. 

Mary Constantinu 

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MELEIA’S KILLER? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The West County Times newspaper has urged the man accused of killing Meleia Willis-Starbuck to turn himself in—which could be more to his advantage in court than for him to be captured—and unless you, as apparently your columnist J. Douglas Allen-Tayor does, sympathize with him, I wish you would also urge him to surrender to the police, and also I wish you would publish a picture and description of him and ask anyone who sees him to immediately notify the police. Since I do not believe it could be possible for him to have for so long avoided capture if he did not have the support of many persons who sympathize with him, I hope that all those who are harboring that fugitive will also be captured and prosecuted. The trouble is that there are so many people who identify with such a man, the same as they identify with Malcolm X or any other demagogue who tries to project himself as the champion and defender of the black underclass. As to Mr. Taylor’s attempts to justify that fugitive’s carrying a gun, I remember that when somebody told Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that he should buy and carry a gun, he said that he would not have a gun even if someone gave him one. I wish everybody would say that. 

If, instead of sympathetically identifying with such people as the man accused of killing the Dartmouth College young woman, black persons and white persons would read and study intensely Dr. King’s book of sermons entitled “Strength to Love” (Fortress Press, 1963, Philadelphia) they could, by applying what they learn there, solve many of the problems we now have, including the worst of all problems in this state of black men killing black men and white men killing white women. The same success in problem -solving could also be achieved by the Palestinians, the Iraqis, and the contentious parties in Ireland by the application of what was preached and taught by Dr. King. The first sermon in Dr. King’s book was preached on the text where Jesus said, “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” (Matthew. 10”16), and in more than seventy years of attending churches, and more than fifty of those years as an organist and choir director, I have never heard any other clergy preach a sermon on that text. If that is because they do not know how, then I would be glad to demonstrate for them how that can be done—even though if I did I would probably not know when to stop. Religious ritutals—or sacraments, if you want to call them that—never have and never will solve problems among us humans on this earth, and clergy could be of great help if they would put aside all their gaudy vestments and rituals as the eighth century prophet Amos demanded and concentrate their attention on learning and teaching non-violent attitudes and behavior. 

Charles J. Blue. Sr. 

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ON THE MEDIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Nowadays, so efficient are the media, one can participate daily and vicariously in the horrific misfortunes which befall others. As one sits comfortably sipping a drink, pictures of death, agony and catastrophe, bounced off satellites between commercials, are skillfully presented on the tragic lantern. The results of the latest famine, earthquake, war or bomb outrage blend into weather forecasts, football scores and advertisements for cat food and breakfast cereals. The newspapers flourish on the offal of other people’s disasters. It has become easy to satisfy a fundamental, human, ghoulish instinct and appetite.” 

(J.A. Cuddon, writing in the introduction to the Penguin Book of Horror Stories) 

Randall Reed  

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SOLUTIONS AND IDEAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve read stories on the Internet, and am putting together some facts, my intuitive impressions, and some guesses on my part. I believe that there are people in our government and military, who are trying to take over the U.S.A., overthrow the Bush administration through a military coup, and are putting New Orleans under Martial Law. I hear rumors of FEMA officials turning back many buses, supplies, rescue personnel, and other needful things, from the people still stuck in New Orleans. 

I am assured by one of my New Age e-newsletters that America won’t be put under Martial Law, and that a violent coup against Bush and Co. is NOT the answer. But NESARA is! 

NESARA is the acronym for the National Economic Salvation and Reform Act. It’s been in the works for years, and it says it will restore constitutional law in America, stop all American war activities immediately, and help ensure a fair, honest re-distribution of wealth. You haven’t heard much, if anything, about this, because it’s been under a Gag Order. Whether or not this is an Urban Legend or “too good to be true,” it IS a very good idea! I believe NESARA is real, true, and about to come. This is the economic side of world peace, and will help get our troops home. Do an Internet search on it to find out more. 

My solutions and ideas: I highly suggest that everybody learn to pray and meditate daily. That you learn to put your mind and body into a state of sustained ecstasy and happiness. This will be a different process for everybody. It won’t help to sit around and get angry at Bush and Co., FEMA, and so forth. What you put out, you get back, according to Universal Laws of Consciousness. You will hear all kinds of rumors on the news, Internet, TV, papers. Some of this will be false. A lot of it is very scary and spooky. Therefore I strongly, strongly suggest that everybody learn to listen to their intuition, their heart, their love, their higher psychic senses, to see what is REALLY going on in the world today. 

Why meditation, prayer, and ecstasy? Because your thoughts and feelings of peace, love, and sheer joy WILL bring about world peace faster! And you’ll feel better. Since when has worrying about all the bad news actually improved your life? 

My name is Linda. I live in Berkeley. I know that World Peace is coming. Cindy Sheehan and the CodePink people and many, many others not named here are working to bring it. 

My final suggestion: It’s probably a much better idea to not waste time dwelling on fearful things or the scary rumors. It is much more useful to all of us to build up strong, specific mental pictures of world peace. Visualize everybody cooperation. Visualize all the kids getting education and food, and freedom for gays and lesbians and other such to MARRY, not just get domestic partnership. Visualize a better world for all. Use your heart-radio to radiate love for all of creation. Extend a smile or a hug or a kind word to strangers as well as people you know. 

I could go on about some of the wilder rumors I’ve heard; true or not, God’s love and We the People of Planet Earth, will WIN this game in the end. 

Linda Smith