Can't the City of San Diego Get Anything Right?

City Council has resurrected their plan to rid the city of RVs, gardeners, plumbers and the rest of us messy folks. I guess the pension mess is resolved, we now have money to pay our Liberians and repair our parks, and the streets are no longer riddled with huge holes.

From R.V.’s United For Fair Parking:

Proposed Parking Ordinance Affecting All of San Diego!

This ordinance would prohibit ALL oversize vehicles, trailers, and recreational vehicles from parking on public streets between 10 pm and 6 am, 7 days a week! An over sized vehicle is defined as being over 7 ft high OR over 22 ft long. A permit to park your RV in front of your house overnight is available (72 hour max). Each permit would cost you $3.50 and you are restricted to 24 per year.

COMMERCIAL vehicles are included in this ordinance. NO permit is being considered for them. Your plumbing vehicle, tow truck and or gardening trailer will be banned from overnight parking on city streets.

I don't know about you, but when I come home at 9 PM or 2 AM, there is no parking in front of my house. So the person with the Hummer can park in front of my house for free, while I have to have a permit. What's up with that?

This is an issue the city keeps bringing up and I've attended many of the meetings over the years. The people opposed are a cross section of our community and their reasons as different as their lives. Seems to me this ordinance is geared towards our working class communities. People with enough land around their houses to park on their own property with a $250,000 RV will not be impacted. But me with a small, but tall van living in a crowded neighborhood get regulated to death.

The next thing you know we'll have to pay to park our bicycles at the beach.

STAND UP!

I'm Angry

And very sick to my stomach.

The corporate bailout has me fuming. When I fume I write letters to people. Since I read the San Francisco Gate online to remind myself of what twenty first century people think, I wrote them to vent my anger at my elected officials and anyone who cares to read. Find my letter online under the title US of C.

Here's the letter that was published by the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, October 3:

US of C

Editor - I can't believe the Senate supported this horrendous bailout of large companies.
Small business is the engine that runs the American economy, and they bail out the large corporations? What kind of insanity is that?
In an economy when our future has been hocked by President Bush, the Senate just sentenced us to living with his mistakes for the next 20 years. How can they justify that? I'm guessing it's because the companies they are bailing out are the major contributors to their campaigns. Democracy is dead in the United States of Corporations.
KARIN ZIRK
San Diego

Senatorial Credulousness

Senate approves bailout after revisions, 74-25.

~ Need I say more....

How personal is the political?

Looking back on writers like Anais Nin and the women's movement of the late sixties and into the seventies, a common mantra was the personal is political and if you examine the personal closely enough, you find the common humanity of all.

As I watch the media staged events that are the campaign for president of the United States, I've started to reframe my own life. For the last nine and a half years, I've been looking at all my problems as my own personal failure to be able to juggle full time work, full time caregiving, and part time projects such as writing, environmental activism not to mention a social life. But listening to some of the speeches floating around, I am beginning to wonder, if there might not be a balance that comes from the direction the President is supposed to provide our country. So I wonder, if for the last eight years we'd had a president who wasn't a spoiled little rich brat, maybe somehow my life would be easier.

Maybe, a descent paying 75% job would be available, because in this job market, it's either work fifty hours a week at a livable wage or work thirty hours a week at the same wage I earned in nineteen eighty. Maybe, there would be health care without a co-pay for calling your doctor on the phone. Maybe, the caregiving burden I am taking off the government's back would be recognized for something - either earnings towards my own retirement or caregiving subsidies. Maybe I would be making more in real terms now than I was twenty five years ago. Maybe we would have had a president who was smarter than me and could come up with ways to lift a burden placed on my shoulders by the failed health care systems.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm to blame. After all, I could just work and care for my mom, not try to save a creek or write a novel or organize my community. Maybe if I was happy working for a corporation so the CEO could vacation in the Bahamas every year, I wouldn't feel so frustrated with my options.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those crack pot dreamers who thinks that there is a way for people to live fulfilling lives, love and be loved, to follow their bliss and still support themselves, and that maybe, just maybe, my hard work will help someone else someday, somehow. That's been an unpopular belief these last eight years. I hope it won't be forever.

To my sister who blazed that trail ~~ RIP Shirley Chisholm ~~ you will not be forgotten. And to all those who have come since, don't forget whose shoulders you're standing on.

YES! Magazine and What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

YES Magazine's tag line is "Supporting you in building a just and sustainable world" and when the latest issue arrives in my mail box I inhale the stories of the rebirth of Students for a Democratic Society, a female president in Chile, autonomous social movements in Argentina, the real scoop on energy usage, and the solutions to the health care crises in this country and I want to be one of the heroes between the covers of the 100% recycled, post-consumer waste, process chlorine-free paper, example of journalism that digs deep and uncovers the peaceful but dramatic social movements taking place under the radar of mainstream media.

As I read, I look for career opportunities that would allow me to pay my mother's caregiving bills while blending my skills in communication with my desire to be one of the people creating a future that respects the planet and the creatures who scurry across her belly. I analyze the careers people have created in their quest to save the planet and each other and try to figure out where I fit in while putting in forty hours a week in the computer trenches as a database administrator.

Once upon a time I had a quote over my desk that talked about the future as something not found, but created, the roads to it are built by those taking the journey and the journey changing both the traveler and the destination and believe it to be true. As Robert Frost said all those years ago, "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

My zig zag journey from the streets of San Francisco to the mission of restoring the native habitat in my ten foot by fifteen foot front yard leaves me middle aged and plodding through the woods, creating a path and dragging a hundred and twenty pound weight behind me. I tramp through the jungle looking for paths between trees and tigers and wonder how I ended up in the this part of the jungle and why. Some days I am weary and I sit down and contemplate finding the energy to climb over one more rock, traverse one more mountain range or swim across another river.

Then I read about tree sitting in South Central Los Angeles, interfaith movements of environmental activists and the purpling of America in the latest issue, grab a hold of a tree and pull myself up and get back to writing and tree planting and caring for another generation while I figure out who I want to be when I grow up.

What's Wrong with the US Government

Today's rant is about the postal service.

I have a friend in Wyoming hiking and camping. He's been there for three weeks and is planning on staying for another two months. I promised to send him his mail from time to time, but never know where he's going to be.

My friend called me the other day and said "send it General Delivery to Pinedale, Wyoming." I put everything in an envelope and rode my bike to the Pacific Beach Post Office to mail it. They couldn't help me. Apparently the United States Postal Service has no ability to find the zip code for general delivery in Pinedale, population under two thousand people. Now Pinedale is a small town as are most towns in Wyoming so I know there's only one post office. I told the postal worker this and she asked her co-workers and they all decided I needed to go to the Midway Post Office, which is six miles away. Now six miles to you rural folks might not sound like much, but for us city folks, six miles of stop signs, traffic signals and up and down hills and back again in under an hour (when I had to be home) wasn't going to happen on my bike. I guess I could have ridden home, started up a car and driven there, but then it would by seven miles there and seven miles back getting close to rush hour.

I felt like I was in the twilight zone. If a person cannot not obtain a zip code from a United States Post Office, then where, I ask, would I find one? So I rode my bike three blocks to the library, got on the library computer, went to the USPS website and searched for the zip code for the street address of "General Delivery" in Pinedale, Wyoming. And I had the zip code.

Then I had to go back to the Post Office to mail the package. Am I the only person who sees something wrong with this picture?