Global Warming And Friends

Global warming is yet one more in a long line of issues that seems to divide people into believers and naysayers. As a person who firmly believes you don't get something for nothing, burning fossil fuels is an obvious no no. How can you burn up energy in 100 years that it took untold millions of years to creating without violating the something for nothing rule? At the very least, we run out of oil and need to find other ways to live in harmony with the planet. Some people argue that American lifestyles require high carbon fuel usage - but at the end of the day that's what's killing us. We're all fat because we're living off the energy of dinosaurs from a million years ago instead of the calories we consumed today.

I don't know what the answer is other than to go forward to the past - to a world were human energy is important, people lived in self-sustaining communities and our homes aren't filled with toxic crap from China. At the end of the day, buying stuff isn't bringing me happiness, hugs are.

In the spirit of local activism and global warming, I want to take a few minutes to share some of my local heroes. Carolyn Chase and Chris Klein - the amazing duo - who live a few blocks from me and who started the huge Earth Fair that happens every year in Balboa Park. I've volunteered with Earth Fair, am saving a creek thanks to a non-profit these two amazing people started, San Diego Earth Works, and have hope that sane decentralized transportation will become a reality in San Diego thanks to Move San Diego - another group with ties to the amazing duo. If it's environmentally progressive in San Diego, this is Chris and Carolyn are your connection.

The dynamic duo is in Copenhagen at the United Nations Conference on Climate change and have put together a website to allow those of us stuck in our mundane lives to hear some of the debates between regular people like ourselves.

Thank you Chris and Carolyn for all you do. You rock.

***From an email from Chris****************

Carolyn Chase and I are in Copenhagen at the UN conference on climate change (COP15). Officially, we are registered delegates of the Sierra Club, of which we are both life members.

We puzzled over how best to make a difference at the conference. We decided to create a special website, Message to America, and post videos of other delegates speaking their "message to America." We have also posted photos, and and there is a blog of updates, quotes, special notes, etc.

The goal is to give you a better picture of the kind of world citizens who are attending the event, and how critical this issue is for much of the world. It's one thing to deal with figures and technical abstractions. It's another to listen to a woman who's island is in danger of slipping beneath the waves.

**************End email from Chris*******************

Sonia Sotomayor and Mission Bay Park

At first glance, most people won't see a connection between the current debate about the role of ethnicity and gender in Obama's selection for his first Supreme Court nominee, but when I walk in Mission Bay Park I think about race, culture and the changing times quite a bit due to the cross-section of San Diegans enjoying time along the bay.

The east side of Mission Bay Park is packed with picnickers at this time of year. Small picnics - a couple or parents with their kids. But there are also large picnics to celebrate birthdays and weddings, anniversaries and holidays. No doubt some of the picnics are just an occasion for friends and family to spend some time in Mission Bay Park, eat, visit, let the kids play, and just wile away the day with cool ocean breezes.

There seems to be two types of large picnics when it comes to race and/or ethnicity. All white picnics. Or picnics with some combination of Hispanics, African-Americans, Filipinos, Caucasians, etc. and a bunch of multi-ethnic children running around. The former is much fewer in numbers than the latter these days.

Which brings me to the charge that Ms. Sotomayor's rulings will be shaded by her ethnicity. Of course it will. And by her gender. And by her life experiences. When a white male is nominated for the Supreme Court, why don't people worry that his gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class will shade his rulings. I don't believe any human lives completely outside their experiences and let's be real here: gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class create your lived experiences.

I think the words "ethnicity" and "gender" are code for the fear that if privileged white Americans no longer control the Supreme Court, the interests of the wealthy will no longer take precedence over the issues of all Americans. This opinion is probably justified, but I'm ready for a Supreme Court that represents the variety of lived experiences, ethnic backgrounds and genders that make up the USA. I live for the day when a transvestite is nominated to the Supreme Court.

As to lived experiences, if the myth of America is that everyone has a chance if they work hard enough, then let's start rewarding those who started life with few advantages and excelled in spite of the obstacles instead of the sons and daughters of the wealthy who were given everything that Ms. Sotomayor worked her ass off to achieve.

This is the American dream.

A Season For Dying

The deaths are piling up like used tires. First Cyndi's dad, than the grandfather Grant had been living with for years in Sacramento, keeping an eye on G-Paw as we called him. My friend Sailor is dying as I type this and sending good thoughts to him and Catherine. But today's post is about Jay Hays.

I met Jay in the 1990s at Oh My God Hot Springs in Southern California. East of the San Diego mountains and west of the Salton Sea. Oh My God was a free place to camp, soak, or just be. My first trip out there was for a regional rainbow gathering in the early 90s. Jay is a Vietnam Veteran who used to travel around in a school bus with a couple of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and play drums. He is a drummer's drummer. Jay started college in the early 1960s but then went off to Vietnam and came back broken like so many men I have known. He tried to use alcohol to fix himself for a whole lot of years.

A few years after I met him, when I was seeing one of his best friends, he called me from the VA hospital in San Diego where he had checked himself into the drug and alcohol rehab program. That point really marked the beginning of our friendship. From there he went to the old Veterans Village on PCH and stuck with sobriety.

Over the next 7 or 8 years, he went back to college - community college. Then on to San Diego State University where he majored in Counseling with an emphasis on drug and alcohol addiction. He did a combination BA and MA program despite a few health related setbacks that slowed down his progress. The years of hard living etched in his body.

It was February or March of his last semester of school that his body collapsed and he ended up back at the VA. The doctors wanted to do operations and try to fix him, but Jay wanted to graduate. He wanted his MA in Counseling before he died and so once he was stabilized, he went back and finished up that last semester.

He invited his friends to graduation and being the oldest student in his graduating program, somehow wrangled a lot of tickets. When I showed up I ran into people I vaguely recognized from those days at Oh My God Hot Springs. Once they introduced themselves, I laughed and said, "I didn't recognized you with your clothes on." That was our running joke and was repeated time and again as more old friends show up.

It took Jay forty years to graduate, but he did it and I'm so proud of him. All my attempts at going to grad school are inspired by Jay. I too started going to community college a long time ago (1976 or 1977). I went to college on and off until the year 2000 when I received my BA from UCSD but that doesn't compare to Jay's track record. He was the one who made me realize that it's never too late.

His mission for the last few years of his life was to help as many people as he could.

After Jay graduate a few years ago, he was hired by an Indian Tribe in Rainbow Arizona to run a drug and alcohol rehab clinic. I haven't seen Jay since he moved, but we've talked on the phone, email and written each other. About a year ago, his health problems returned with a vengeance. His liver began shutting down. He was able to get on the list for a liver transplant and died on the operating table on January 28 of this year. Jay knew his days were numbered for years.

Jay we're going to miss you. A mutual friend was with him at the end and Jay was worried that his comrades in this battle against using alcohol to fix brokenness were going to backslide and he didn't want that. So if you're out there, please call a friend, go to a meeting, or plant a tree. It's what Jay would have wanted.

I Don't Deserve This Moment

My entire life has been lived in the world of cultural change. As a child, I experienced the changes unfolding in the world and as an adult I've tried to move the change forward a few inches. Yet today, on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the eve of the inauguration of our first African American, Black, Negro president, Barack Obama, I feel like I'm reaching the top of the mountain and I truly don't feel I deserve the celebration or the joy I am feeling.

Not that I haven't been harmed by racism and inequality, because I have, because we all have. Not that I haven't tried to help others understand why racism is wrong, because I have, because so many of us have. But I haven't been beaten, arrested, denied a job or prevented from being with the one I love because of the color of my skin (or my sexual orientation for that matter). Listening to our American heroes from the big like Congressman John Lewis to the 90+ year old set of African American civil rights foot soldiers talk about what this day means, makes me feel like an impostor, like I haven't suffered enough to enjoy the celebration.

And yet.... Tuesday morning I'll be watching it live on television and, no doubt, I'll be crying like a baby.

Be the change you which to see in this world.

Ethnicity and Culture

Today was the annual House of Sweden Christmas party. My mother being Swedish and a long time member, she goes every year and I take her since she can't go alone. It's sad as no one visits much with my mother because she is aphasic and can't find the words to express her thoughts (but that's an aside).

As a child, I was dragged to all sorts of functions, taught to dance traditional Swedish folk dances and sing in Swedish. I even sang on television once as part of group of Swedish Christmas song singers. Imagine twenty girls and three boys, ages six to eighteen, walking single file through a dark room wearing white robes and tinsel in their hair. All carrying lit candles.

Most people would think a group of people involved with the House of Sweden would be primarily Swedish or at least of Swedish ancestry. My heritage is mixed. My mother was born in Sweden; my father in Estonia. But there wasn't a House of Estonia and I grew up more in touch with my mother's culture than my fathers. There were other kids of mixed heritage back in those days. Lots of Swedish Americans of course, but Mexican Americans and even if I remember correctly a young girl who was of Chinese descent. More recently, a Japanese American woman wrote the monthly newsletter and the Lucia pageant, while still mostly blondes, included a very dark skinned young woman of Indian (the continent) or African ethnic descent.

I wonder if Sweden has a House of America and if its members include Swedish Arabs or people of Pacific Islands descent?