Category: Current Affairs

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My Club

Because California has joined the national movement to hold presidential primaries no later than the beginning of the previous year’s Christmas shopping season, we had two primary votes this election cycle. On SuperDuper Tuesday, we voted for presidential candidates and a slew of ballot measures. Yesterday, we voted on state legislative races, a couple more initiatives, some local officials, and party central committee members. (Not that I know who the members of the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee are, and not that I understand what it is they do. I voted for one yesterday, Wes Van Winkle, because–I know someone who uses this method for betting on horses–I like his name. He didn’t win.)

I felt blasé about the election. I didn’t have any strong feelings about anyone or anything on the ballot. When I finally overcame my inertia to go vote late in the afternoon, the polling place was deserted. The poll workers acted like they hadn’t had much business all day (someone commented that I was the 57th person to vote for the day; they had been open for 10 hours at that point). This is in Berkeley, where people miss no opportunity and spare no effort to express their opinions.

I don’t know the city turnout. But countywide, 24.24 percent of registered voters cast ballots (that includes mail-in/”absentee” ballots). Pretty anemic, but better than the statewide figure, 22.2 percent. In our SuperDuper primary, 57.7 percent of registered voters participated, and 60.1 percent in Alameda County.

That February vote got a lot of attention because of the high turnout. It’s true that it was the highest in a long time (see the California Secretary of State’s table (PDF file) of primary election statistics going back to 1910). But if you go back to the 1980 primary, 63.3 percent of registered voters turned out–perhaps because of the presence on the ballot of Proposition 13, the initiative that slashed property taxes in the state and helped make it much, much harder for counties to raise them. Or maybe not: 1980 itself marked the beginning of a long term trend toward lower primary turnouts in presidential years. The primaries from 1964 through 1976 all recorded turnout from 70.95 to 72.6 percent.

Of course, if you look at yesterday’s statewide participation in terms of percentage of eligible voters, it’s much lower. California has about 23 million people qualified to go to the polls; about 16 million are registered. Yesterday’s turnout was just over 3 million, or a shade over 13 percent. I never thought that by voting I’d be in an exclusive club.

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A Pause with the Wretches

Phone rings about 9 p.m. I answer and get the “telemarketers’ pause” — that delay you hear in auto-dialed calls. Eventually a voice comes on the line:

Telemarketer: Steffen?

Me: No, no Steffen here.

T: Mrs. Breek? [So much for my deep, manly voice.]

Me: No.

T: Well … we’re calling everyone in California to let them know what’s going on. I’m from the U.S. Navy Veterans Association.

Me: We don’t have any money for you. We sent it all to Iraq.

–End of call.–

[Here’s a brief account of someone else’s call with the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, and here’s a Department of Veterans Affair link to info on the group. I’m holding on to that “we sent it to Iraq” line for when the Democrats call next.]

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Fire

Today’s big Bay Area news: a wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The wind is blowing hard from the north, and the blaze is moving fast. The images below are from a NOAA weather. The top frame (click for larger image) shows a smoke erupting (near Monterey Bay, the big scalloped area in the bottom center of the picture) at 5:30 a.m. The next frame (8 a.m.) shows the smoke plume spreading south two and a half hours later. The bottom image, from 10 a.m., shows a wider view of the coast with the southern end of the smoke plume off the coast of Santa Barbara County (also see the NOAA satellite loop).

Fire1-052208

Fire2-052208

Fire3-052208

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The Rules

[“Immigration raids terrify kids, House is told” — San Francisco Chronicle]

You know, it’s such a gift to have had ancestors who had the foresight to emigrate to the United States while the doors were wide open. I’m not saying that everyone involved in the melange of immigrants that led to me qualified as wretched refuse, but I’ve seen where most of them came from. There are a lot of rocks strewn across the fields they worked. There is plenty of wind. There are long winter nights to contemplate the season to come and how to keep the cold out. For the people who left there, nothing was in short supply but level ground, cash in hand, and a prospect that things might change for the better.

But they crossed, they did, and they were welcome to try what millions of others had tried. They farmed. They mined coal. They worked in the stockyards, taught school, ministered to parishes, and worked in banks. If any of them got rich, I never heard about it. They did something far more important: They made me and everything I know possible.

The country kept the door wide open back then, but that should not be mistaken for an act of warm-hearted generosity. The country needed willing hands to help realize its manifest greatness; those forebears of mine and the millions like them were more or less willing.

I have to wonder how they would fare today. The door is still open, but just the slightest crack. Yes, lots of people slip over, under, or around it. Once they do, they seem to embark on the same path those forebears of mine did–they are today’s willing hands, and in slaughterhouses and construction sites and farm fields far and wide they are building something that only their children and grandchildren will get to see.

Or maybe not. These new immigrants aren’t following the rules if they fail to wait their turn at the door (a door, it should be noted, that is unlikely to ever open for their ilk–poor, uneducated, unable to speak our language). The rules–that’s another thing I have to wonder about. In the debate over immigration today, descendants of yesterday’s immigrants’ are careful to point out what honorable, law-abiding rule followers their ancestors were. Without subjecting anyone to a historical treatise just now, let’s just say that the bar for entry for most of these huddled and rule-following masses was a lot lower than it is today–unless, of course, they were Chinese or Japanese or from some other group loathed by the rule writers.

So, many of our new immigrants aren’t waiting their turn. Today’s immigration rule writers have decided this behavior is a danger to the country and are taking steps to punish the rule breakers. What form does the punishment take? See the article linked above. It talks about immigration roundups. I know most of us know this is going on, have heard stories about workplace raids, and probably put the whole business out of our minds.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who teaches nearby told me about a student, one of the brightest in the class, who had come to school with his mother that morning. The mother was weeping. Why? the teacher asked. Because immigration agents had pounded on her door at 7:30 p.m., swept through her small apartment, and taken away three relatives. It was a shattering experience.

So this is what we’ve created to safeguard our bastion of prosperity–thug tactics in which a certain sector of the population is freely targeted and virtually without legal recourse. Oh, yes, none of this would happen if the affected people had just followed the rules, and we are, above all, a nation of rules. But there is a human cost here in the dismantling of people’s lives, the destruction of their sense of security, and in sowing emotional trauma. And for those who have got ours already, the sons and daughters of past generations of rule followers, there’s a cost in building the kind of apparatus that treats people as if they’re so much garbage to be thrown out. I’m all for rules–I’m not a fan of anyone coming into my house and taking my stuff, and I hate people who cut in line–but the rules need to have a humane edge. At our best, that’s the kind of rules we’ve written.

(Oh, and my solution for the illegal immigration issue: Amnesty, education, and citizenship.)

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From the Mailbox

Pandemic051507

Here’s an odd recent arrival, thanks to our letter carrier (the one we used to have a cordial relationship with before we got a dog, but that’s another story). The county health department wants us to know how to fend off the avian flu epidemic (sorry–pandemic) that was coming last year. Thanks, county health department. Inside the pictured folder (with its weird “up, up with people” logo) is a fold-out sheet with helpful information like the frequencies of the local emergency broadcast stations, addresses of hospitals, and reminders to wash your hands.

On the long list of things I worry about, the avian flu is pretty low–way behind my concern over George W. Bush being able to launch a nuclear weapon, for instance.

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Burma

Burmamap050807

From the New York Times: Satellite-based maps of the coastal area before and after this week’s storm struck. I don’t know from Burma–my most intimate knowledge came from reading the post-World War II novel (and seeing the movie) “Harp of Burma.” And the country has made incidental appearances in other readings. And then there’s been the news about Aung San Suu Kyi. And that’s it, except I’ve the name Irriwaddy River has always had a lovely resonance for me. Like Mississippi.

And now this. One of the breathtaking things about the maps is the storm track they depict. I’m not sure if that path is characteristic of storms in the region, but look at it; eyeballing the scale on the map, I’m guessing it scraped along the coastline for a good 400 miles. In the newsroom, my impulse would be to put that in terms familiar to the reader, so here goes: Imagine a storm of that ferocity traveling the coast from San Diego to San Francisco; or from Norfolk to Boston; or Memphis to Chicago.

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Burma

Burmamap050807

From the New York Times: Satellite-based maps of the coastal area before and after this week’s storm struck. I don’t know from Burma–my most intimate knowledge came from reading the post-World War II novel (and seeing the movie) “Harp of Burma.” And the country has made incidental appearances in other readings. And then there’s been the news about Aung San Suu Kyi. And that’s it, except I’ve the name Irriwaddy River has always had a lovely resonance for me. Like Mississippi.

And now this. One of the breathtaking things about the maps is the storm track they depict. I’m not sure if that path is characteristic of storms in the region, but look at it; eyeballing the scale on the map, I’m guessing it scraped along the coastline for a good 400 miles. In the newsroom, my impulse would be to put that in terms familiar to the reader, so here goes: Imagine a storm of that ferocity traveling the coast from San Diego to San Francisco; or from Norfolk to Boston; or Memphis to Chicago.

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Strictly Partisan

The Bush-McCain Challenge: It’s a bit of partisan “education” by way of MoveOn.org. It’s not an intellectually demanding quiz, but it’s worth playing through to the “carrot round.” Have fun.

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Tonight’s Fund-Raising Call

The Democratic National Committee called tonight. After all the sterling work the party has done since the 2006 election, helped of course by my hefty donations (five figures if you go to the right of the decimal point), a very cheerful and polite and hopeful-sounding young woman wanted to ask me for another couple hundred bucks.

You know, I was on the verge earlier today of writing down the litany of the woes I read about and hear about and witness and the sense I have that we’ll be good and tangled up in these things for a good long while: The people blown to pieces day after day after day in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people losing their homes or walking away from them, the four-buck-a-gallon gasoline, and the president who says everything will be fine if we just do things his way. Then there’s the stuff we apparently just accept as part of the landscape now–our shambles of an education system (tell me, when’s the last time you heard the candidates slug it out over that?), our excellent but increasingly unaffordable system of health care, and the fact we’ve apparently decided that as a country we can’t or prefer not to pay our own way anymore.

Did I mention that domestic ferry passengers in Washington State are being accosted by border agents demanding proof of citizenship? Or the sudden and calamitous decline of the last big salmon runs in California over the last year? Declining dollar, anyone? The estimate of my state’s budget deficit for the next year increased from $8 billion to $10 billion to $20 billion in just the last four days (or maybe it didn’t).

And then I look at the parties and the trio from whom we’ll select our next president. While all of the above is transpiring, one of the Democrats has been reduced to talking about his minister’s loony views and apologizing for speaking frankly about the fear and frustration that drives the electorate. His principal opponent is capitalizing on the fear and frustration to sabotage him (and probably herself, too, in the fullness of time). The guy from the other party appears to be promising more of his predecessor’s worst policies along with a few gems of his own.

Plenty of tunnel. No light. I know this is not the glass-half-full view. I know I am not being “part of the solution.” I am not being the change I’ve been waiting for or that you’ve been waiting for either.

You know, tonight’s not a good night to ask for that two hundred bucks.

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Today’s Best Expression

“As mad as a hatter.” That’s a tried and true formulation, though maybe a little archaic. One of Kate’s colleague’s has supercharged it and and updated it a little. In reference to someone who might be a little off-center, she’s fond of saying, “He’s as crazy as a f—ing mad hatter.”

So there, Charles Dodgson.