Public Comment

By Dan McMullan 

George Beier’s recent letter to the Planet about David Anderson, the homeless man who was a hero in the Aug. 9 fire at 2600 Hillegass has got to be one of the most shameful exploitations I have seen in Berkeley politics in a long time. George portrays himself sitting with this poor man, listening sympathetically to his story and then crying out to us, “Is there any good Samaritan out there that can give our hero a guitar!” I mean, come on George, you’re a multi-millionaire for Pete’s sake. You probably spent more than the price of a guitar on your last bottle of wine and you let that man leave your meeting without one?  

For quite awhile I had been hearing, reading about and seeing the damage George has visited upon the less fortunate of our community. In his capacity as point man for the university, he has waged an unceasing war on the homeless and used his position as president of the Willard Neighborhood Association to help put into play the University of California’s most ambitious and audacious land-grab to date.  

It’s important to me to get my facts straight, so I called George and invited him to come out and take a ride on my wheelchair trailer. As we rode along, I asked him questions. I wanted to understand how someone that had so many blessings in his life could be so callous towards those that had so little. I asked him why he went after the young people at the Le Chateau student co-op housing. He told me that all the kids there were on heroin! I think their crime was that they allowed Food not Bombs to cook one meal there a week for the homeless and poor in People’s Park and were generally supportive to community efforts to help those in need. George said that he only helped organize the lawsuit and that it was his life partner John that was actually a plaintiff and got a monetary award.  

“But don’t you live three blocks away and around the corner,” I asked.  

“Well not really that far,” he answered.  

Then I asked him about his favorite scare tactic: the assertion that “We have found 1,000 hypodermic needles in People’s Park in the last eight months.” I call this the “Thousand Points of Fright” platform. In 20 years of working (and at one point living) in the park, I have found maybe three. I asked Terri Compost who has been doing the gardening almost daily for many years. She said she might have come across five, and my wife, who was born in Berkeley and has been playing in People’s Park since she was 8, said that she never has found one, but maybe has seen some caps that go on the needles. We bring our young kids to the park and childproof the area before we let them play and if there were needles there I’d be the first up in arms.  

His attacks on the free-box that brought clothes to many homeless and working poor have left many out in the cold, and has even left my family without enough clothes. And the promise to completely redesign the park to be “more like Willard” while not only being disrespectful of years of work of the people of this community is completely insane. Willard Park has like three trees!!! You would cut down the trees in People’s Park while the polar ice caps fall off into the ocean?  

And then there was the little business about the pamphlet put out by George and the Willard Neighborhood Association. The flyer distributed to students and renters in his neighborhood was titled “How to be a good neighbor” and schools the peasants on how to behave. It even points out the laws you could be breaking if you make too much noise or your car is ugly. George said that the flyer was actually written by Irene Hagerty, director of Community Relations at Cal. When I asked him didn’t he think it a little unethical to use a neighborhood association as a front for the university and a vehicle to gobble up the Southside neighborhood, he seemed perplexed. In an interview with Irene and George dated Sept. 21 by Kate MacMillan in NorthGate Online, an online newspaper put out by the Cal Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. MacMillan, who takes no pains to hide her revulsion of the lower classes, quotes Irene Hagerty as saying, “The university has no plans to build anything more substantial than a childcare center or rehab center in the park.” What will they be rehabbed for, their lack of greed and avarice? When asked about People’s Park, George says, “It’s gross, something has got to be done.” What is gross, George? All the trees? The green grass? Or is it the people that Ms. MacMillan describes as gray lumps?  

Sometime back someone wrote that if I use strong words like Nazi and fascist in my writing, what will I have to use when I am confronting real evil? What we tend to forget is that before the Nazis went full out evil on the Jews, they did a test-run on the homeless and the disabled. When not many cared to speak up, they figured they could get away with anything. Some people say that the ideals of the park are outdated and naive, but I feel that with a horrible war and our planet and the human race in dire peril from global warming, we have never needed the park and its message of a community united more. The politics of fear have always been used by those who lack the skill and vision to tackle the real problems. If you want to improve People’s Park, ask the university to stop demonizing the park and scaring away good people who would make use of it. In Ms. MacMillan’s article student Katie Solinberger is quoted as saying, “I always take a longer route to the park. They pretty much warned us about doing that during orientation. It would be nice to hang out there, but there are always cops there and it just seems like there is a lot of shady stuff going on.” But what Ms. Solenberger does not know is that the folks up in the UC have plans for the park and if she hung out there it would become much harder for them to bring that about.  

It’s been almost 15 years since I told Andy Ross at Cody’s that if he ran off all the characters on Telegraph, he would have to hire actors to play them. Our community and Cal students are not enough to sustain the businesses on Telegraph and their high rents. These rents are reflective of a place that is a tourist destination. So when you run people off, chase them around with green machines and deploy cops on every corner, it tends to put a damper on the scene those tourists are looking for. I was up on the Avenue the other night and there were two cops for every person out there. While they were harassing homeless people down by Haste, a young student got shot up on Durant. There is a lot of crime in that area, but it comes in the form of out-of-town people who see our students as rich and easy marks. Not from People’s Park, the free-box or the homeless. We need to address the reality of what is going on. Berkeley police spokeswoman Mary Kusmiss says about Telegraph and People’s Park, “The perception of crime has as much impact on a community as actual crime,” and she is right. Isn’t it time we came together and changed these perceptions, dust off the ideals that made this community a leader in doing the right thing for all people and admired throughout the world? Isn’t it time before the point is moot and our planet is irreparably damaged and we are all under water?  

Dan McMullan works with the Disabled People Outside Project. 

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