Volume II Issue 15
Contents
Editors
Jennie Abbott
Robin Brooks (in absentia)
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by Pirot Eknik
I love fireworks!" Jennie said in an interview this 4th of July at the Berkeley
Marina, where she watched the flashes and colors with a smile on her face. She was there
with her sister, Jordan, and a friend who had arrived that day in Oakland after a road
trip from the East coast (see related article, The Open Road).
As they walked out the length of the marina they could see some fireworks in Oakland,
and at the end the ones in SF were a foggy blur in double. Right overhead they saw
excellent fireworks, although Jennie wished the big, flashing booms were spread out with
other big cot off three to five at a time and setting off nearby car alarms with the
vibration. Jennie’s ideal display includes big, colorful explosions with a flash
"and a big boom, the kind you can feel," at the center when the color starts to
fade away. "I wonder what the DC show was like, with the computerized, choreographed
extravaganza," Jennie posited, but she was happy without musical accompaniment.
Free fireworks shows draw a very broad audience. "Everyone comes to see
fireworks," Jordan commented as they milled among the crowd gathered in the best
viewing spots or ambling toward the water and the pier. Families were there together,
speaking various languages, rich and poor, black, white, and brown people were there,
mixed together; looking up, not judging. Jennie says, "I think fireworks are joy and
peace—what for most people are the expectations of the Winter holidays."
Here’s to sharing that spirit year-round... Let the fireworks explode!
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- Jordan drove across the country with a friend from high school to spend the summer
months with Jennie, keeping her company until Robin’s return.
- Jennie has been enjoying two summer classes: pottery on Monday nights and sign-language
on Thursday nights. Her classmates are interesting with various backgrounds, and she is
happy to make new friends, even if she only sees them once a week.
- Jordan and Jennie attended the Lilleth Fair concert in South San Francisco with Leta
Herman (Smith ‘89), her husband and their 2-year-old son. All attendees enjoyed the
show, and the consensus was that Tracy Chapman was the best performer that night.
- Due to the late date of this release, we can inform you that Jennie has auditioned and
been accepted into a local women’s a cappella group called VOICES. She is delighted
to start singing again when the group resumes regular, weekly rehearsals in September.
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by Lawn Awder
Maybe the English have it right (even if they drive on the wrong side of the street):
They call tax- and government-funded educational institutions private schools and those
requiring tuition public schools. Here in the United States, what historically has been
known as public is gradually becoming private, and the private sector is controlling what
still goes by the name of public: The public government and National Public Radio are
funded and/or influenced by the contributions of private individuals and corporations,
Barnes & Noble and Borders have taken over what public libraries once provided, but
women’s reproductive rights have moved from the private sphere to the public.
Perhaps due to lack of vocabulary, we often have to define a word, or interpretation or
phrase, in order to discuss the concept. Private sometimes means: for-profit, owned by an
individual, owned by several people, personal, not for public knowledge, or
non-governmental. Of course, defining the private sector is becoming more and more
difficult because the stock of private sector companies is held by many individuals, the
public. When a company "goes public" it sells stock on the international market;
then the company is no longer private. Defining concepts of public and private by what
they are not, a common method of measure, particularly challenges us in that we cannot
define one simply as not the other because there are at least four concepts: public,
private, publicly funded private organizations and privately funded public organizations.
Current trends head in the direction of privatization in historically public
institutions. National Public Radio, for example, is a public organization but is funded
primarily by the private sector through tax-deductible donations. While a contribution to
such a valuable organization as NPR is well-spent money, will money take control of the
programming? The United States government is another example of a privately run public
organization; there money buys influence, why couldn’t money influence the news? In
addition to the lobbyist’s money pouring into the coffers of puppets who will
legislate for money, the government runs privately in that it governs by the few in power
for the few with money.
Barnes and Noble is preferred over public libraries for quiet, peaceful reading places.
Since "the public library... has been pushed and pulled by professional librarians
and by policy makers responsive to the trend of the times," (Tisdale, Sallie, Silence
Please, Harper’s Magazine, March, 1997, p. 66), libraries provide internet access to
the few people without other access to a PC and have cut back on real books as the virtual
ones arrive on CD-ROM. Budget cuts force public libraries to choose limited possiblities
over breadth of collections. As libraries become louder and have fewer books and more
computer terminals, people retire to the private calm of Barnes & Noble, sponsored by
the corporation who profits from the trend of buying books instead of borrowing them.
Other cuts in public spending perpetuate the trend toward privatization in all aspects
of people’s lives. The private sector has money, and money = power. Money can buy
favors, votes, legislation, renowned professors and reputation. Money, it seems, can also
buy morals. Consider religious Right organizations who fund anti-abortion advertising and
organize attacks on abortion clinics. While they impose their views on the public, the
political Right imposes its moral views by cutting spending for public services.
The most compelling division in the public/private debate is in women’s bodies:
laws which control whether a woman can make decisions about her own pregnancy (including
birth control, abortion and sterilization). Women are not considered whole beings along
with whatever is inside them. The laws consider only parts of the person, making part of
an individual public property, subject to public laws (for the sake of the fetus), while
ostensibly the woman is still granted individual rights as a US citizen. Because women in
fact are one unit,
pregnant women become only their fetuses; they disguise and sacrifice the rest of
themselves and their interests in deference to the state’s willingness to see only a
small part of their need. The fetus thus becomes an incorporation of the woman, a business
fiction and uncomfortable tapestry woven from rights-assertion-given-personhood. It is an
odd, semiprivate, semipublic undertaking, in which an adversarial relationship is assumed
between the public and the private. (Williams, p. 185)
Earlier this century when abortion was entirely illegal, money could buy rights to that
public fetus and make it a private concern whether the woman had an abortion or not. When
the money is public, though, coming from government funded by taxes, some vocal public
taxpayers decide that it is their right to decide how that money is spent.
The debate comes down to an issue of money. Money can buy, protect from, and take care
of the public. It can make the public private, maintain the privacy of those with money,
and receive special treatment such as capital gains tax cuts, nicer prison cells and
corporate welfare. The remaining public are welfare recipients (a "public
burden"), social service organizationss struggling to meet an increasing need for
counseling, rehabilitation, housing, job training and child care. Capitalism struggles
with the public/private debate because money can buy both.
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by Sue Barue
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long, brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Walt Whitman
"What was Flagstaff?" Caitlin asked. "Remember? The frozen-yogurt
cappuccino blast." Jordan explained, as they tried to separate in their minds their
different stops.
"It really made the trip much better because we didn’t have to worry about
having it all stolen somewhere else" was their positive attitude about the break-in
and theft in their car in DC, before they started out for their 12-day, 5117 mile drive to
the Bay Area. Now that they have arrived they miss the clothes that were stolen, the mix
tapes and CDs, Caitlin’s laptop, and all the little things they haven’t
remembered yet.
Still, it gave them an excuse to do a little shopping. Jordan will stay with Jennie
this summer, and Caitlin will begin an internship at Nyingma Institute in Berkeley on
Monday, July 14, after spending a long weekend with her family at her sister’s
graduation in Oregon. She enjoyed sleeping in her new, beloved and cozy sleeping bag on
the couch at No. 6402 and Jordan and Jennie enjoyed her company.
In the words of Jordan Abbott:
Caitlin and I made our way from one coast to the other according to plan. That is to say,
we saw the people we intended to see, and visited the locations we selected ahead of time.
In between and along the way we came upon countless surprises. These surprises are the
elements that turn a trip into a voyage, traveling into adventure.
We left most of the broken car window and a lot of material possessions behind in
Washington, DC, and endured no further tragedies. The trip was such a success--so
"perfect"--that we couldn’t wish to change any of the circumstances that
contributed to it, even the seemingly undesirable break-in. Our zigzag path took us north
through Chicago, Iowa City, and Omaha, then south into New Mexico and Arizona. Kentucky,
Colorado, and other glamorous and not-so-glamorous spots provided buffers on the ends and
in the middle. Two fatalists, one somewhat skeptical and the other rather optimistic,
accepted an opportunity and faced each event pertaining to it with varying levels of
surprise, enthusiasm, and determination, but never with devastated or deflated spirit. A
combination of no expectations and high expectations created a thick, orange line that
blazed a trail across the country without regret.
America consists of many different levels. You notice them when you downshift into the
switch-back and steal a glance out over the Rockies. You see them as the shadows shift
below the rim of the Grand Canyon. You recognize them in the constructed landscape of
rusted drinking fountains, spot-lit corporate fountains, trailer parks and mansioned
boulevards. There are other levels, too: levels of light and levels of laughter. The drive
from the Capitol to California was a leveling experience. Iced mochas vary as dramatically
as the terrain, but each one is really just a blend of flavor and refreshment.
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