Collisions with Reality

On Thursday, BART turned off the cell phone service inside the stations in anticipation of a protest by No Justice No BART. The main source for the timing of the protest was a deleted blog post viewable via Google cache. (Alas, the cache has now expired, and I never took a screenshot.) There were a couple of details on the post that made me a bit suspicious, though. Protestors were urged to take precautions to keep the protest plans under wraps, including not linking to or emailing the web page, and one suggestion was “text the URL to trusted friends”. That last part made me laugh, but that’s when I realized there were two options:

1. The people behind No Justice No BART are idiots who have no idea how the internet works. (Given their reaction to passengers’ anger at them for disrupting rush-hour trains, this is plausible.)
2. The people behind No Justice No BART are punking us. There was never going to be a protest.

I realize that option 2 is perhaps giving them too much credit. But one blog post, and BART turns off the cell service for three hours? That is power, and that goes down in the books as a successful attempt at targeting some aspect of BART’s service. And despite the disruptive nature of the last protest, I am a hell of a lot more scared of the phone service being turned off than I am of some people chanting on a train platform.

(Meanwhile, with Anonymous maybe throwing their hats into the ring, I have never been so glad to commute by bus.)

In early June, when it was announced that Johannes Mehserle would be released from prison sometime this month, various groups planned a protest on the day of his release. Although he was released at 12:05 a.m. this morning, the protests occurred yesterday in Oakland. A few hundred people gathered at the Fruitvale BART station, listened to a few speeches, and continued on to downtown Oakland. From our home, we could track the progression of the protest by watching the police (and news?) helicopters from afar. How was this protest going to go?

One protester was arrested for graffiti. And that was it! No other vandalism, no violence, no sirens. Just a couple hundred people walking along International Blvd. But there were protests after the verdict, and after the sentencing, so why yet another one? From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, whose legal fund paid for Mehserle’s defense, said Sunday that Mehserle never received special treatment and his sentence was fair. More than two years after the shooting, he said, the protests are “accomplishing nothing.”

“Accomplishing nothing”? Not quite. The relationship between the African-American community here and the Oakland police (and perhaps the city government in general) is not great. Previous protests in this series have ended with smashed windows and hundreds arrested. But yesterday, one person was arrested for graffiti, and the city provided buses for free shuttles back to Fruitvale BART. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

A few days ago, I saw an article about the horrible catch-22 the Oakland schools are caught in. There is a huge drop in test scores from the elementary schools to the middle schools in Oakland. So many of the top elementary students leave the district. Which results in a big drop in test scores from the elementary schools to the middle schools. And so on.

You can’t even say that people don’t care about the schools here. There was a school measure on the ballot this past November, Measure L, which would have raised $20 million/year for the district via a parcel tax. Nearly 66% of the Oakland voters voted yes on Measure L. 66%! In a town where unemployment is over 10%! I know most districts in Ohio would kill to get 66% of the voters to approve a levy! But alas, we are in California, and we need a 2/3′s supermajority to raise taxes of any sort. And we just missed it.

I don’t even have anything cheerful to balance that out. It’s just a long, slow slog.

For the first time that I can really remember, I’m thinking of the next 6-12 months as just the next 6-12 months, not “the next school year”. That’s just one of the many adjustments I have ahead of me as my family moves to the Bay Area and I leave academia. What exactly does figuring out what I’m doing with the rest of my life entail?
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Before I moved to California, I was one of those people who swore I couldn’t live someplace without four distinct seasons. Once here, though, I realized that California does have seasons. They’re subtle, but there. The poppies and lupines bloom in March and April. June is jackaronda season. Our lemon tree goes crazy in January and February. There’s even a fenugreek season, according to our favorite herb guy (. . . not that kind) at the farmers’ market. Eventually I realized that I didn’t miss the four seasons as much as I specifically missed a “proper” midwestern autumn, and everything associated with it — the changing leaves, apple-picking, hot cider, cool weather, football game days on campus, and even Halloween decorations. But mostly-warm weather year round? I’ll take it!

What I haven’t gotten used to yet is the way that coastal California is out of sync with the rest of the country. When everyone else is freezing in the winter, we’re enjoying sunshine and warm weather. In May and June, when it’s starting to get hot elsewhere, we’re stuck under cold marine layers. In October and November, when it’s starting to get cool elsewhere, we still get temperatures in the 90′s F (30′s C). But perhaps nothing is as bizarre as this week — there is a brutal, brutal heatwave in the Northeast, and here it is . . . 60 degrees F and rainy. RAINY. In California. In July. WTF. Do I blame El Niño? Or is this just what I get for gloating about the weather here?

Guess I should get used to it if we’re off to the Bay Area this fall. Throw in the extremely high local variability in weather, and I’m about to get very good at layering.

There’s a primary in California next week, and ironically, Proposition 14, which would destroy the primary process, is on the ballot. Instead of a primary for each party, followed by a general election, we’d have an open primary with all candidates from all parties, followed by a run-off of the top two vote-getters.

With the California ballot initiatives, I generally start out opposing them, and needing a damn good argument to vote for them. I try to suss out the ulterior motives of the supporters. Read the rest of this entry →