Arts & Events

The content of city meetings pales in the shadow of the enormity of the events beyond our city borders, but I will at least start with the city meetings I did attend.

Nothing much of consequence happened at the Council Agenda and Rules meeting on Monday. The September 14th council agenda was approved and Councilmember Taplin’s budget referral measure for license plate readers was referred to the Council Safety Policy aCommittee.

The Planning Commission took comment on the Ashby – North Berkeley BART mixed use housing projects. I did not count the callers for each side: those who would like the housing project proposed for North Berkeley BART to stop at seven stories or thereabouts and those who declare support for a large project in the belief it will bring down housing costs. There were also declarations of accepting diversity and accusations that those wanting a single-family home neighborhood were harboring attitudes that were exclusionary. I was the lone voice to ask that support of ecosystems, native plants and the environment be a part of the planning. That mostly fell on deaf ears with one exception, the new Planning Commissioner who was part of the native garden tour earlier this year.

It is now estimated that one in three Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster. Has it changed our behavior? Or, do we think about what it takes to create a healthy ecosystem? Ecosystems are more than just the trees, birds, butterflies and plants we see. It includes the microscopic organisms. Just like our bodies need the organisms in our guts to digest the food we put in our mouths, ecosystems need a balance of native plants to support the organisms that keep it healthy. 

As I walked home from the Farmers’ Market I passed a mother and daughter with rows of plants not native to this area. They were preparing the ground. I asked, what about native plants and got a stare, not an answer. Of course, if you go to a local garden center you will be hard pressed to find plants native to our area. Finding a garden store with native plants takes effort. We still charge along believing we are the masters of the universe, able to modify and destroy as we wish for our immediate pleasure. Mother nature is telling us who is really in charge and it isn’t us.  

Thursday was the Public Works Commission. It felt like the meeting was going nowhere although there was extensive discussion of my public comment that the permeable paving on Allston Way at construction sites is being replaced with asphalt. PG&E is supposed to restore the permeable paving to pre-construction condition. The status of replacing the permeable pavers is to come back as an agenda item next time. 

It is always interesting when traveling to see that Berkeley still carries a reputation as a bastion of progressive ideas and an activist public. Those days are long gone. There are still activists, but the mayor, council majority, city manager and staff have demonstrated they aren’t really interested in any ideas other than their own, certainly not the contributions from commissioners or public. Council members had no interest in hearing from commissioners when they went about taking their hatchets to the city commissions. 

If the infrastructure bills actually pass and get signed into law, Berkeley should be ready, but it will be interesting to see if the future is any different from the past. I remember attending agenda committee meetings when Tom Bates was mayor. Kris Worthington would keep presenting opportunities to apply for affordable housing grants, on the edge of begging for Berkeley to apply. His pleas fell on deaf ears. So, when speakers blame neighborhoods for declining diversity(the Black population in Berkeley according to the 2020 census is less than 8%) the focus really needs to be shifted to what has always felt like planned gentrification coming from the top. 

The Public Works Commission has been one of the most productive of all the commissions, saving the city hundreds of thousands of dollars by producing studies and reports, for example on paving and utility undergrounding. One would think that of all commissions, Public Works would be supported in readying the city for funding opportunities that might come if the infrastructure bills finally land on the President’s desk for signature. 

Now to the issue that has been most on my mind: Texas, the Supreme Court, abortion and the establishment of vigilantes to do the work of extremists. During the August family visit, my niece insisted I read Handmaid’s Tale. Novels are not my usual fare, but as you may imagine when I heard of the Texas bill signed into law to block abortions I felt as though I entered a dystopian world not so far from the one I was reading about. It must be said that those who thought up the Texas anti-abortion bill were incredibly clever in squashing a woman’s right to control her own body. Texas is now a world where the empowered vigilantes can fatten their own bank accounts while raining misery on those who might come to the aid of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy. This is very ugly. 

I remember 2013, the fortieth anniversary of Roe versus Wade. I was Exhibition Chair for Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art and responsible for organizing the art exhibit Choice. Trying to engage women around the right to an abortion consumed every waking hour. It was near impossible to motivate young women who had had access to birth control and abortion their entire lives. They seemed incapable of comprehending pre-1973 life of illegal and botched abortions and lives ruined. I had t-shirts printed with our 4 Choice logo and the phrase, “Make 2013 be the last year women lose more rights than we gain.” And, here we are. 

As I wrote two weeks ago in my Activist’s Diary on the book Jesus and John Wayne, we have been outflanked by CWA (Concerned Women of America) and like-minded conservative anti-abortion zealots. They are turning Texas into a state of spies with everything to gain and nothing to lose as they chase after their bounties from anyone or any organization that might offer help a woman end an unwanted pregnancy. And it just isn’t about unwanted pregnancies. What about complications? What happens when a woman is miscarrying or has an ectopic pregnancy? Will she be left at the door to suffer or die? 

Responding to this Texas law requires creative thinking and action. We might look to Periods for Pence for ideas. If this article doesn’t stir up your imagination it does have some very entertaining phone transcripts to Mike Pence during his tenure as governor of Indiana in 2016 on the passage of HEA 1337. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7_64 

Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t the only book I read this week. The other was Sarah Chayes’ book On Corruption in America: And What is at Stake published in 2020. It was Chris Hayes’ interview with Chayes in his August 17 podcast Why Is This Happening that perked my interest in reading her book and she did not disappoint. https://www.stitcher.com/show/why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes/episode/withdrawing-from-afghanistan-and-the-impact-of-global-corruption-with-sarah-chayes-200230640 

Chayes covers a lot of territory and the links she draws between individuals, governments and the layers and levels of corruption are fascinating. She also hit a lot of my favorite subjects: questioning using growth as the measure of success, the environment and overpopulation. Most of all she calls out people by name and the threads that connect them. If I didn’t have such a large stack of books to read, this is one I would go through again. Corruption is what brings down governments and there is plenty to go around on full display. Chayes gives corruption as an answer as to why Afghans were so quick to walk away from their posts to defend Afghanistan from the Taliban.