Public Comment
Letters to the Editor
PEOPLE’S PARK
Editors, Daily Planet:
Last Monday I attended the meeting of the People’s Park Community Advisory Board. During the public comment period people spoke about many issues around the question of removing the berms at the edges of the park—visibility, neighbor’s fears, drug dealing, the need for seclusion, and so on. No one mentioned the basic question: Whose park is it? Does it belong to the people who create and use it? Or to the University of Corporatia?
It turns out that the university has backed down on removing the berms. But there is more mischief afoot. The advisory board and the university plan to hire a landscape design company. This company is to uproot 40 years of creativity and sweat by the local community and replace it with an outsider’s concept. This is completely inappropriate. People’s Park is more than berms, or grass, or even trees. It is also a monument to a community’s ability to create something beautiful, if only we can get out from under the bosses’ thumbs for a bit. That is what this new plan might destroy.
At the meeting someone suggested that park supporters should pick their battles. I would add that we need to be clear about what we are fighting for. We are fighting for a park that belongs to the people.
Helen Finkelstein
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WHERE WAS THE PLANET?
Editors, Daily Planet:
Derby Street, one of the two or three most controversial land use projects in Berkeley in recent memory, went from community pariah to community feel-good project last Thursday night, but where was our local newspaper? After 12 years of discord, hundreds of letters to the editor, the field users, neighborhood and Farmers’ Market put down their war axes and reached a consensus on what is known as the Curvy Derby plan. Yes, there are still details to be worked out, and while it was clear that a majority of people attending the meeting supported this new plan, there are still a handful of people objecting. But without question the meeting on Thursday was an historic event if only because it was the first time since BUSD resurrected their plans for an athletic field at Derby that field users, neighbors and the Farmers’ Market were actually allowed to meet and discuss options for a baseball field at the site—and they reached consensus. Why this wasn’t newsworthy for the Planet is beyond me.
Doug Fielding
Chairperson, Association of
Sports Field Users
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BERKELEY, 1928
Editors, Daily Planet:
With regards to the proposed Memorial Stadium development, your readers may find this 1928 aerial image of interest. It clearly shows the existing and (then) freshly planted trees. My favorite detail is the lovely curve of north Piedmont Avenue. Bypassed in the 1940s perhaps for parking, it was replaced in the early 1950s by the courts at the Piedmont/Gayley intersection. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:8085/AerialPhotos/airphotoucb28/.
John Vinopal
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TREE PROTEST
Editors, Daily Planet:
The Panoramic Hill Association does not represent the feelings of quite a few residents on Panoramic in regards to the lawsuit it has filed against the university. After reading Richard Brenneman’s article I wondered if Doug Buckwald used to write for Saturday Night Live. “These harassments pose a direct threat to the safety of our tree sitters. Sleep deprivation could cause our tree sitters to accidentally stumble, tie a knot incorrectly or fail to clip a carbiner properly to the rope for the harness. Any of these mistakes could cause a fatal fall.” Well, considering they’re trespassing, that’s the chance they have to take. If you’re worried about losing oak trees, south of Leona Quarry there are about 400 that a developer wants to take out. So Doug, get your priorities straight.
Matthew Shoemaker
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TIGHTWAD HILL
Editors, Daily Planet:
Opponents to the plans for Memorial Stadium include the over 1,000 football fans from Tightwad Hill. They signed a petition against the UC design to add rows of stadium seats and sky boxes which could block the free view that the fans enjoy from above the stadium’s east side. Their mobilization complements the fighters on the west of the stadium who seek to save the old oak trees—earmarked for replacement by a fitness center.
Asa Dodsworth of oaks group sees saving the trees as “one of a multitude of related problems.” He speaks of a potential coalition of tree-sitters on the stadium west, hill sitters on the east, homeowners with gripes against UC on the south, and to the north, the students and alumni trying to stop the conversion of Bowles student resident hall into a hotel for corporate visitors.
For Planet readers who hate football: Tolerance is asked for the motley Tightwad Hill crowd, described by their spokesperson, Cal grad (PhD) Dan Sicular, as fans who either will not pay to see Cal football, or cannot afford to. Their hill “is a public resource” he says. And climbing it is “what goes around here for an age-old tradition.” The sitters have trudged up the steep slope since stadium opening in 1924. In the ’60s and ’70s, when our team was awful, the aroma of ganja was strong, as those on the hill did more viewing of the panorama of the Golden Gate than the action below.
This year Sicular mobilized to publicize the hill. He and friends sold t-shirts, strung banners, circulated the petition, and Sicular wrote letters to the Regents. He welcomes our support.
Ted Vincent
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THE GREAT MOLLOCH
Editors, Daily Planet:
It looks like the great molloch, UC Berkeley, is finally and long-overly-dueelly being challenged by a couple of sweet tree-sitters and, just recently, some home owners above the stadium, to desist from felling oak trees around the stadium. Years and years ago I dated a girl in Sherman Hall, a UC student coop, and I would walk back, after taking her home, through that wonderful grove of beautiful oaks. I hope fervently that this fight to preserve the oaks will become a cause as powerful as our own People’s Park.
Robert Blau
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‘THE ORGANIZER’
Editors, Daily Planet:
I see that Pacific Film Archive is finishing off a series of Italian films this Saturday with the 1963 The Organizer, starring Marcello Mastroianni, one of the three or four films that, at the end of his life he told an interviewer, he felt proud of having been in. It told of the terrible conditions in a textile mill and the aborted attempt to unionize and change them. I’ve seen the film maybe a dozen times. The first time was in 1963 at the SURF Theatre in San Francisco, the only place to see foreign films at the time. I remember going to visit my parents and saying, “This is not the usual Anna Magnani stomping grapes in the sun. This is northern industrial Italy. It’s like what you told me about your childhood in that factory town. You have to see it.”
My parents replied, “If it’s about our childhood, we don’t care to see it.”
Fast forward to 1985. Both of my parents have recently died, and Bob and I are going to Italy for the first time. We connect with my cousins in that factory town (my mother had kept up writing to them, then I had taken over) outside of Turin, called Balangero, which was no longer a factory town but a bedroom community for folks who commuted to Turin to work at Fiat. One day, I am walking with a cousin, stumbling through a conversation in my halting Italian, when she points to a crumbled heap of bricks, and tells me, “that was the factory where everyone worked. Funny thing, back when I was in high school, I came home, and there was a film company out here, trucks, equipment, movie stars....”
Yes, it turned out that the interior factory scenes for The Organizer were filmed in that factory, which was no longer operating at the time, but still had the old machines intact. Various people in the village were employed as extras, so, yes, I had seen some distant relatives in the film. The video was just available, so I bought it and brought it home to my cousin’s house. My plan: We would watch it together, and they could point out neighbors, friends, and relatives who appear briefly. We set up the video.
After about 20 minutes, my cousins began chatting, walking in and out of the room, generally inattentive, even avoiding looking at the screen or at me. I sat there feeling I had made some kind of mistake, but didn’t know what it was. Finally, one cousin took me aside and said, in slow, careful Italian to make sure I understood. “Look, we know you Americans admire all those post-war neo-realismo films, all that ‘Open City’ stuff. But we don’t like being depicted as a backward, ‘colorful,’ third-world, war-torn country. Those days don’t interest us. We don’t want to be reminded.”
His response was like that of my parents. I was proud of the struggle of my family. But for my cousins, their parents’ hungry 12-hour days in the textile mill (that drove my family to emigrate to America and more struggles), were a reality that went on and on, along with two world wars (leaving memorials “ai caduti” all over the village.) It was all still too close. Maybe one day they’d feel distant, secure, like me—not yet.
In any case, it’s a great film, and if you miss the Saturday night showing, you can rent it or borrow it from the Berkeley library. A classic.
Dorothy Calvetti Bryant
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END THE WAR
Editors, Daily Planet:
All the new Congress has to do in January is to repeal/cancel the original Congressional Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243)(Oct. 16, 2002). This action will end the occupation of Iraq immediately. It would pass and become the land of the land with a simple majority vote in both the House and the Senate. After this repeal vote passes, Bush will have to immediately withdraw all the troops from Iraq or else be will be acting illegally and unconstitutionally. If he goes down the route of defiance, he would be immediately subject to being impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office. Of course, Cheney should be impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office first. Can you say President Pelosi?
This repeal of the original Congressional Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 will not be able to be construed as “not supporting the troops,” because it will merely be terminating the troops’ current assignment.
James K. Sayre
Oakland
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SNOOP DOGG
Editors, Daily Planet:
We are students at Berkeley High School. The rap icon Snoop Dogg has been in the business longer than we’ve been alive, his music is respected and appreciated.
Because of this Snoop Dogg is a role model to youth all across the nation (meaning they are influence by his actions). Snoop Dogg’s music is legendary and popular but his lyrics send out the wrong message to the youth. He promotes marijuana use and gang affiliation. Smoking weed has many health risks, and many serious ones like cancer and damages to the reproductive and immune systems. Marijuana is more damaging to the bodies of youth than adults because everything in our bodies are still developing.
Recently, we came across TMZ.com and found ads for Snoops Dogg’s own line of blunt wrappers called “The Blue Carpet Treatment.” We are shock by this, not only is he promoting marijuana use but it also adds to his personal message about perks of smoking. What is Snoop Dogg gaining from promoting these blunt wrappers except enslaving a new generation of addicts? There is no respect being gained from this. Respect of an artist comes from talent and music, not from promoting unhealthy behaviors.
We all know many people who have gotten caught up in drugs or smoking and that have died because of it. We have dedicated ourselves to preventing the further use of tobacco and other drugs, and educating people about the harmful side effects. We respect Snoops Dogg’s talent in music but it would be more effective if he didn’t add to society’s destruction of youth.
Shantel Mitchell
Derwyn Johnson
Nayiri Donikian
Antonio Beroldo
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STORMY WEATHER
Editors, Daily Planet:
Ever so often the situation in Iraq hits the news cycle like a storm stirring up political bickering, drowning reason and lifting ordinary people like me from bewilderment through incredulity, to disgust, hopelessness and despair. Who could have predicted that the unprovoked invasion of a fifth-rate dictatorship would spread so much dissent, hatred and bloodletting?
Scan the storm’s path: remove Saddam, implant freedom, foster democracy, suppress insurgency, stabilize Baghdad, and…exit strategy? Only the first was accomplished, the others form a succession of twisted mistakes and failed turns toward a very dark horizon.
If you place the most recent news event energizing the storm, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) Report, alongside its earlier cousin, the 9/11 Commission Report, and strip away their sugar-coated bipartisan, pseudo independence so that you are able to view them with naked common sense, you’re bound to be profoundly flabbergasted.
Our top leaders seem immune to empathy. Has politics and celebrity rendered them bloodless? Not one of them considers how he/she might react if 140,000 uniformed and heavily armed foreigners, ignorant of our language and culture, patrolled the Washington D.C. streets, supervised and sanctioned Congress and guided Supreme Court proceedings.
Members of the ISG directed their efforts toward indefinable success and unrecognizable victory. It is unlikely that they, who cannot resist another bite and the juicy news apple, will move a president who perversely prefers saving face over saving lives.
Marvin Chachere
San Pablo
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IMPEACHMENT
Editors, Daily Planet:
Car bombs killed 63 innocent civilians and wounded 106 more in central Baghdad Tuesday morning.
A study produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by the Lancet (one of the world’s leading medical journals), claims that the number of deaths in Iraq is more than 10 times greater than previously estimated. It is said the death toll in Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion has topped 655,000—one in 40 of the entire population. This is an old finding with a new report putting the number of civilians killed at closer to 800,000.
Are the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in George W’s misbegotten war grounds for impeachment? How many deaths will it take?
Ron Lowe
Grass Valley
