San Francisco marketsFair Oaks and Fair Trade

This is story about San Francisco mini-neighborhoods.

When my friends and I bought the communal property where we live, the seller's real estate agent optimistically handed us a descriptive flyer claiming the house was located "just blocks from Noe Valley!" Sure and pigs can fly. When you are half a block from 24th Street and Mission, you are pretty far from Noe Valley.

Noe Valley, a neighborhood five long blocks up a steep hill from where I live, was a quiet working and lower middle class location when I moved to the city in the 1970s. Folks who lived there were families, mostly white but with a large sprinkling of Latinos. The one thing that Noe Valley had in common with the Noe Valley of today was lots of kids. Now though, the children are mostly blonde and they are often watched by nannies while their upwardly mobile, professional parents toil long hours in the upper reaches of San Francisco's economy. The houses are valued in the million $$ plus range and the commercial thoroughfare, upper 24th Street, is a mix of boutique shops and yuppie chain stores.

Don't get me wrong. I like Noe Valley fine -- my gym is there and their supermarket sure beats anything else in walking distance. But Noe Valley is another country from the Mission.


Last Saturday was the annual Fair Oaks Street Fair. Real estate optimists aside, Fair Oaks is where you know for sure you've gone far enough uphill to be in Noe Valley, absolutely no longer in the Mission. The annual garage sale is a BIG DEAL, 5 blocks of neighbors selling their junk in front of their houses.




These young women were enthusiastically hawking "Lemonade -- Cookies."


There were some amusing items for sale.


But it was hard to imagine why anyone would want most of this stuff. Even the sellers seemed simply to be going through the motions, acting the part of holding their annual garage sale.


The most enthusiastic participants were folks selling food for the benefit of the local schools, public and private. This woman was slinging hot dogs and tamales for Fairmount Elementary.


I bought a cookie to support these women, though I had to interrupt their conversations to make the purchase.

As I walked north on Fair Oaks, the displays became further apart -- less householders were participating. This segment of Fair Oaks hopefully aspires to be another neighborhood altogether:


I've never heard anyone actually use that label for this area, but I haven't been reading real estate flyers lately.

In its northernmost block, Fair Oaks runs uphill coming to an end at 21st Street -- Noe Valley shades over here into Dolores Heights, land of magnificent Victorian follies.


It was a pleasure to wander down into green Dolores Park itself, an oasis where the Mission, Noe Valley, and the Castro come together, more or less amicably.


There I found another kind of market where volunteers were eager to tell me about World Fair Trade Day. These good folks sent me off with a message of global hope and a sampler of goodies they trust are produced equitably.



I wandered home via Valencia Street, a main drag in gentrifying transition which I'll document another day.

Still not getting it after all these years

Philip Zimbardo, an emeritus psychology professor at Stanford, has a recent book rehashing the famous psych experiment he carried out over twenty five years ago. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil has as its thesis that pretty much any of us will act in accord with roles that a respected authority puts us in. The experiment, in which students were assigned roles as "prisoners" and "guards", soon degenerated into brutality. Zimbardo writes:

Anyone, when given complete control over others, can act like a monster.

Zimbardo's girl friend (later wife) shamed him into stopping the experiment which had become all too real.

Zimbardo seems awfully defensive of his famous bit of psych theater, even though a good part of his claim to fame is that he stopped it. He still needs to score off one of the "prisoners" who concluded the whole thing must have been a bit of government research on how to control antiwar protesters since Zimbardo was funded by the Office of Naval Research of the Defense Department. The suggestion still riles him.

Little did he know that I myself was a radical, activist professor, against the Vietnam War since 1966, when I had organized one of the nation's first all-night 'teach-ins' at New York University.... I organized thousands of students into constructive challenges to the continuing war. I was a kindred political spirit but not a mindlessly kindred revolutionary....

...it [was] upsetting to think that my research grant status [was] being accused of being a tool of the administration's war machine, especially since I have worked to encourage effective dissent by student activists. That grant was originally given to fund empirical and conceptual research on the effects of anonymity, of conditions of deindividuation, and on interpersonal aggression. When the idea for the prison experiment occurred, I got the granting agency to extend the funding to pay for this research as well, without any other additional funding.

Seems to me the gent protests too much: according to his bio as a member of the board of the American Psychological Foundation,

Dr. Zimbardo has also recently become the Director of a new terrorism center sponsored jointly by Stanford and the Naval Postgraduate School, The Interdisciplinary Center for Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism.

Zimbardo is still on the Navy's dime apparently. And probably still oblivious to -- if not willfully self-deluded about -- the fact that his intentions have little to do with how others may may use his insights into breaking down human beings.

You don't say....

Hajji Arbab Daulat Khan, left, Parmakan’s village chief, in a school classroom damaged during the attack on the village. He said 57 villagers were killed. Joao Silva photo

What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

New York Times,
May 13, 2007

Gosh, Afghans must be human. Who knew?

Here in the United States, we don't know yet that this adventure is, like Iraq, also "lost." I wonder how long it will be and how many will die before we figure that out?

Dorothy Donahue gets motherhood

eran chesnutt photo

The letter that follows was published in the Boston Globe back in January. This mother has a lesson for us on Mothers Day.

Love and let love.

God gave me a gift, a wonderful son who happens to be gay. God does not give inferior gifts. God does not make mistakes. This little boy that God gave to me is now a fine young man. But my son is treated like a second-class citizen by my church. Maybe my state constitution will treat him likewise. I pray that it will not.

If you had a gay loved one in your family you would be a better person. You would be sensitive to the discrimination gays endure. You would realize that they, too, are entitled to mutual love.

God will continue to send gay babies. We must take them into our hearts and our lives. That would please God.

DOROTHY DONAHUE
Norwell

Love and let love indeed.

Women honored in Mission concert

Last night, in the "gap" days between Mother's Day in Mexico and Central America (it is fixed on May 10) and the U.S. celebration (second Sunday in May), Trabajo Cultural Caminante presented a concert, "Premio Mujer," at the Brava Theater on 24th Street in San Francisco's Mission District.


On this evening, the Brava Theater, usually an island of the hip and groovy amid the grit, was brought back to the old time Mission.


The place is a refurbished movie theater with some nicely preserved art deco details.




Betita Martinez, author of 500 Years of Chicano History, turned out for the fun. She's working on the sequel, 500 Years of Chicana History, illustrated with hundreds of photos.


The event honored five women -- Sr. Cecilia Calva, Catherine Cusic, Catherine Sneed, Jenny Alejandrez, and Patricia Wells -- community activists all, who've contributed to the wellbeing of the 'hood and its people. Most of these folks have known each other since the heady 1980s when the wars in Central America set the agenda for the neighborhood. Today they are still working for and with current residents -- as headliner Francisco Herrera insisted: "let's stop with the talk about 'immigrants' -- let's say it: 'the working class.'"


The community ensemble, La Rondalla Voz del Sentimiento, opened with a mix of traditional Mexican and Chicano music.


Ubiquitous folk singer John Fromer delivered his tribute to women.


But this was Francisco Herrera's gig. Everyone in the Mission knows Francisco. For the last twenty-five years, if any individual or group -- tenants, straights, gays, religious, leftists, aspiring politicians, immigrant activists or labor organizers -- has called a rally, Francisco has been there to entertain and inspire.


And over the years, he's become more than an agitator. Today he's quite a smooth musical performer.

The evening was a gift to a community with a lot of problems that needs and celebrates its occasions for joy.

One tough lady

The village postmaster, Tomeko Nagayama, 77, spent 186 days behind bars. She was held alone in a windowless cell that she was forced to clean every night after enduring a full day of interrogation.

The police said her refusal to confess was harming her family, she said. Her husband was sick and could not live alone; her daughter had to quit her job to take over the duties at the post office.

But Ms. Nagayama, a former schoolteacher, never once considered confessing.

“I felt I’d rather die,” she said. “This kind of thing just shouldn’t be tolerated in this world.”

New York Times

Apparently prosecutors in Japan have a 99 percent conviction rate. Police can hold and interrogate suspects up to 23 days without charges; they almost always get a confession -- unless they run into someone like Tomeko Nagayama.

Blair going, going ...

So Tony Blair is finally exiting -- good riddance I say, though really it's none of my business. He's the Brits' monster to deal with -- GWB is our responsibility. But I am surprised as I wander around the U.S. blogosphere at how relatively lightly Blair gets off in the esteem of usually progressive commentators. Many Brits are not so kind.

Mr. Blair ... is a boundlessly superficial person...

A.N. Wilson, New York Times

The man who declared that his arrival in office was a "new dawn" did not end, and perhaps in the end deepened, public cynicism about politicians' honesty and motives.

Nick Robinson, BBC blog

And so, a slippery, malodorous and rather unpleasant part of the country’s anatomy is finally going to be douched.

Justin McKeating, Chicken Yoghurt blog

Here's a pre-primer on some of the faults of Mr. Blair for folks in the United States.

• The guy is sleazy. You didn't like Abramoff peddling Congressmen's votes? Blair's Labour Party apparently sold peerages to raise cash for its last general election campaign. Blair may not have done the deed himself, but it was on his watch and he's been interviewed twice by the investigators. He also was party to killing an investigation of financial misdoings at the behest of a Saudi bank. Ugly stuff.

• Blair's idea of governing was to cozy up to Rupert Murdoch, the right wing tabloid press tycoon. Sensational murder and mayhem sell papers. The Blair government has been all too willing to play to this. A critic writes of Blair: "Rupert Murdoch helped formulate the public opinion that got Blair elected and has since had a hold on him. This has resulted in knee-jerk legislation coming from New Labour every time a grizzly story hits the headlines." (By the way, on this side of the Atlantic, Murdoch is fan of Hillary; bears remembering.)

• Because Blair has always had an elastic relationship with truth, he thrives on a dazed public. Encouraging fear after 9/11 and even more the London 7/7 bombings served his purposes. Fear enabled his government to gut historic British expectations of civil liberties. From Blairwatch:

  Under Blair, Britain became a surveillance society with more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world. Demonstrating outside Parliament became illegal without prior permission from the police. ... Blair pushed hard to impose ID cards on us all with biometric information and all details about us (including medical) easily accessed by government departments as well as fraudsters. The right to trial by jury is being eroded, habeas corpus has been suspended.
  
  Yet despite all these measures, Britain is no safer according to the same government who introduced this Draconian legislation. We are constantly being told of numerous terror threats against us.
  
  ...we've also seen an 80 year-old heckler manhandled out of a Labour Party conference and we've seen a woman arrested for reading out the names of people killed in Iraq. The Terrorism Act is used as a catch-all to prevent any sort of dissent. There was even an attempt to pass a law allowing further laws to be made without Parliamentary scrutiny called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

  Because the Brits don't have a written Constitution, one authoritarian government can pull all this off. Not that we're proving a shining example of Constitutional limits ourselves.

• Of course the huge Blair blunder that everyone notes was Iraq -- Blair's choice to join in George W. Bush's imbecilic crusade, against the wishes of masses of Britons, has ultimately overshadowed everything else that took place under his ten year government. The war could only be sold by egregious lies and a subsequent cover-up that undermined the legitimacy of government itself.

***So today, Brits find themselves in the condition we hope to bring ourselves to in November 2008: a reviled politician is on the way out; something/someone will come next. Immediately there will be another Labour government led by Gordon Brown whose ten years in the shadow of Blair have not suggested he'll take any independent direction. Meanwhile the Tories, ostensibly to the right, sit in the wings confident that they'll win the next election because of people's disgust with Labour. Yet, again from Blairwatch,

the two great opposing parties are merging into one homogenised entity where, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which one takes power and the theatrics in Parliament are just that.

U.S. progressives are actually lucky that Democrats were not the primary force behind our failed imperial war in Iraq -- we can at least hope to turn our surging Democratic party in a somewhat progressive direction. We're not quite as stuck as our British friends -- but only if we make it so.

Let Move-On hear from you about impeachment

Via A Lovely Promise: Apparently the Move-On site has a deeply buried page asking whether George W. deserves impeachment and why. Whenever you read this, go on over and let them hear from you. I don't remember getting one of their endless stream of emails about this. Maybe if enough of us show an interest, they'll move on it, will ask the question straight up to their 3 million members.

It is not only happening here...

On Monday, May 7 in London, "illegal immigrants" and friends gathered for a Roman Catholic mass, march and rally seeking "earned amnesty" for undocumented residents of the United Kingdom. Considering that Britain is an island and not adjacent to any country whose economy can't feed its citizens, such migrants are quite numerous: the British Home Office says 570,000, while Migration Watch suspects there are more like 870,000 persons in the U.K. without proper papers.

According to the Guardian:

The "Strangers Into Citizens" campaign was joined by faith leaders, immigrants from across the world, community activists and church groups in a gathering in Trafalgar Square, central London.

The campaign is calling for a two-year work permit, without access to benefits, for "irregular" migrants - refused asylum seekers or visa overstayers - who have been in the country for four years or more. ...Under the proposals put by the campaign, those qualifying for a work permit would be given indefinite leave to remain at the end of the two-year period subject to criteria such as an English test, no criminal record and employer and sponsor references. ...

A colourful procession through Whitehall before the rally featured drummers, whistle-blowers, and Latin American bands, playing in spite of driving rain at times.

Some carried banners reading: "Abolish all racist immigration controls." Other banners read: "No one is illegal. Regularisation for all."

Within their own context, British and European Union countries are experiencing the same strains caused by neo-liberal globalization that we are in the United States. Capital -- that is corporate wealth -- is free to wander the globe looking for opportunities to squeeze profit from the cheapest available labor. People -- that is labor -- are not free to migrate under this regime, but they will come where the wealth is, as certainly as a moth flies to a flame.

The rich world needs more equitable immigration policies. But if citizens of the rich world don't want migrants, they/we can only stem the tide by adopting trade and labor policies that enable poor countries to provide a decent life to their own peoples. Only equitable economic development in the poor parts of the world will keep hungry people at home.

Immigration issues in California will test aspiring presidents

Immigrants on the march, May 1, 2007.

Yesterday the New York Time's Adam Nagourney offered some speculation about how the early February California primary would impact the presidential contest. Most of the piece was just cutesy East Coast superciliousness, but his stuff on immigration policy seems worth teasing out a bit:

... its sheer size, its concentrations of both liberals and conservatives, its status as a money tree for candidates and its role as fertile ground for policy innovation make California especially likely to wield additional clout this time around. The result is not just a change in tactics; it is altering the dialogue of the presidential contest in substantive ways. It is forcing candidates to turn their attention to issues, debates and controversies that have historically drawn little attention on the early playing fields of Iowa and New Hampshire....

To some extent, this surfeit of issues reflects what has always been California's reputation as being slightly ahead of the curve -- some might argue off the curve....

Immigration is a particularly tough issue here for both parties, in a state that has been transformed by an influx of Hispanic voters. It has created political cross-pressures on Republicans, who are trying to deal with voters who see the influx of immigrants as a threat to their safety, cultural identity and economic well-being; and Democrats, who have benefited in the past decade from the perception among many legal immigrants that Republicans are anti-immigration. The latest debate here is whether illegal immigrants should be granted drivers' licenses.

Link.

Actually, there is nothing "latest" about the drivers' license issue; it is more like a hardy perennial. State Senator (formerly Assemblymember) Gil Cedillo has been working to regularize driving by undocumented California residents since 1998. His measures reached the Governor's desk three times under Gray Davis; Davis even signed one in the super-heated atmosphere of the recall election, but under pressure from the newly triumphant Governor Schwarzenegger, the legislature repealed it in late 2003. The Governator promised to support a modified version in 2005, but under pressure from the Republican base, instead vetoed it. The issue will come back this year in the form of a bill that brings California into compliance with the Federal REAL ID act, but gives persons without documents a special form of license. As Cedillo explains:

An estimated 22 million motorists take to our roads and highways every day of and roughly 10 to 12 percent are untested, unlicensed and uninsured. That means higher insurance premiums for the rest of us and the likelihood of a hit-and-run if anyone is an accident with one of them.

This is pretty much a settled issue for California Democrats -- but one that drives the Republicans crazy.

In general, immigration policy has driven the California Republican party a little nuts -- and contributed mightily to its slide into minority status. Since Republican Governor Pete Wilson rode fear of immigrants to re-election in 1994, the party has made itself home to anxious white supremacists and racist wingnuts -- this is not only a strategy for a shrinking base as Latinos and Asians increase their proportion of the California electorate, but also makes the party appear the locus of racial friction that fits poorly with Californians' pride in our diversity. Schwarzenegger's personal popularity hasn't overcome this; in 2006 Democrats won all but one of the statewide contests below the governor level.

Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata wasn't so far off when he impoliticly suggested last year that the other party included a bunch of "crackers." A San Francisco columnist tromped happily into the subsequent fray:

"Crackers'' isn't the right word, but the whole dustup about giving illegal immigrants driver's licenses does have the ring of the old South. After all, it isn't as if 11 million of them aren't already in the country. Wouldn't it be better to have way to track and monitor them?

And Perata is right. This is a red meat issue. The idea of building a great big wall between us and Mexico sounds terrific except for the part about how it won't work. In fact, it didn't work in China hundreds of years ago and it won't work here now.

But he shouldn't call them [Republicans] "crackers.''

Even if that's what he thinks they are.

A consequence of California's restrictive term limit legislation has been complete turnover in the legislature since the late 1980s. This turnover has made room for much greater numbers of new politicians, especially Asians and Latinos, than might yet have won office if incumbents had been able to stay on. It is notable that the present Speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Nunez, was a Latino student activist who railed in 1995 against Pete Wilson's cynical manipulation of the fear of immigrants. The California right wing goes bananas recalling his youthful speeches. State Republicans are getting what they so blithely sowed.

The real immigration issue here in California, as in all the country, is that we have an undocumented population doing much of the necessary work to keep our society going who have no rights in relation to their employers. In this, California is very like the rest of the country -- but much further into the process of "internally outsourcing" our dirty work. If some kind of "immigration reform" makes it out of Congress in 2007, candidates will duck behind that, though it is unlikely to solve the problems.

Nagourney is certainly right that candidates running nationally, in either party, are going to find our environment about immigration policy challenging. Lines about immigration are not drawn in the same places here as elsewhere. We have spent a decade dealing with the anxious fallout of immigration-driven demographic change. The issue could blow us apart again (whites are still the overwhelming majority of the electorate) but we've gotten to where a majority doesn't want more strife. We're sitting in a precarious, somewhat exhausted, truce.

It will be very hard for any of the candidates to split the necessary differences to hold their bases and attract the bystanders insofar as immigration is a serious topic in the primaries. And what they might need to say here is likely to be discordant elsewhere. Aside from far right wingers, especially Tancredo, I would expect them all to try to stay out of it here. The enormous scale of a California primary -- meaning that elections must be fought mostly through media -- will help them keep it shallow on the immigration front, I think. And they won't mind being shallow on an issue that won't likely help and might hurt their chances.

Malefactors of great wealth

The title is President Theodore Roosevelt's phrase for the vicious monopolies of his time (1901-1908), especially the railroads (which controlled transport and consequently all commerce) and sellers of unsanitary food and meat. A couple of stories leaped out at me today that point to some of the most egregious contemporary malefactors: the health insurance industry.

Producing nothing, simply making money from our necessity that we bet against our continued well-being, insurers aren't content to profit from our insecurity. They'll scam any way they can to make a buck.

From the New York Times, quoting unreservedly to avoid the paper's pay-to-read wall:

Insurance agents, spurred in some cases by incentives like trips to Las Vegas, have aggressively marketed the private plans, known as Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment in them has skyrocketed in the last year, and Medicare officials foresee continued rapid growth in the next decade.

In Mississippi, George R. Dale, the state insurance commissioner, said, “Abusive Medicare insurance sales practices are spreading rapidly throughout the state.” State Senator Terry C. Burton, a Republican, said, “My office is receiving calls daily from seniors who have been victims of unscrupulous salespeople.”

Proponents of private plans say they are indisputably good for many older Americans because they coordinate care and may offer extra benefits, like discounts on eyeglasses, hearing aids and dental care.

But federal officials said that the fastest-growing type of Medicare Advantage plan generally does not coordinate care, does not save money for Medicare and has been at the center of marketing abuses.

These “private fee-for-service plans” allow patients to go to any doctor or hospital that will provide care on terms set by the insurer. In most cases, no one manages the care. And some patients have found that they have less access to care, because their doctors refuse to take patients in private fee-for-service plans.

That is, having blocked meaningful national healthcare reform and enforced maximal possible confusion through the Prescription Drug benefit scam, health insurers pay sleazy salespeople to sell excessively expensive "plans" to seniors. Charming.

Meanwhile, in California, according to the Los Angeles Times, a lawsuit is slowly working its way through the courts contesting the insurance company practice of "retroactive health policy cancellations." That is, if you have the effrontery to get sick and need to use the insurance you pay for, they investigate you to see whether you might have made some error on your application form. And Blue Shield apparently uses a deceptive form that downright encourages an unwary applicant to neglect to fill out information on all members of a household.

Cindy and Steven Hailey fell into this trap. Now Blue Shield not only refuses to pay the $450,000 in medical bills Steven Hailey incurred after a 2001 car accident, it has also garnished his wife's wages to try to get back the $104,000 it paid out while investigating the couple.

Their mistake: they listed Steven Hailey's weight as 245 rather than 285 and thought they didn't have to give his medical history because of a confusing paper form.

So far, the courts have sided with Blue Shield. Great news for the insurance companies: force everyone to pay you good money -- avoid taking responsibility for their claims. Take their money right to the Wall Street Casino. Nobody passes "GO" but the malefactors.

Why do we allow these people to stay in "business"?

"A day in baghdad"

U.S. AID offers this photo so we'll appreciate what our tax dollars are doing for the emerging Iraqi "free press."
A reporter for McClatchy news service in Baghdad wrote on May 5:

When you start your day with bombs or waking up on you phone ringing and one of your relatives telling you on the phone that your friend or some one you know has died.

Or getting panic while you eating your breakfast because on of the militia kidnapping your neighbor.

Then you will know how important to feel that you are in safe[ty]. ...

We still have no where to go. We became strangers even in our own houses.

Wissam, Inside Iraq

Now that Riverbend and family are leaving the hell the U.S. has made of Iraq, some of the most immediate testimony from that suffering country comes from blog posts by McClatchy News' local staff. If you want to know what it is like to live and work in Baghdad, almost daily installments are available.

By working with U.S. newspapers, these folks have very likely given themselves a death sentence when -- there is no "if" -- the U.S. leaves Iraq. Folks in the peace movement must agitate our government to admit the masses of refugees who will continue to stream out of that broken country.

Changes in the 'hood

One of the great pleasures of urban life is that we have real neighborhood corner stores. If you need a quart of milk or just about anything else, in the genuinely citified parts of San Francisco, you can just go down to the end of the block to the local hole in the wall. There's no parking and the shelves tend to be crammed to the bending point, but most of what people need in everyday life is there, marked up a little, but convenient.

The owners of these places are vital to the fabric of the neighborhood. They know us all and the smart ones are friends to all, from the local drunks to the snootiest yuppies. Their stores create foot traffic that makes neighborhoods safer (see the work of Jane Jacobs.)

Recently the storeowner on our corner retired after about 30 years and sold off his business. Like most of our storeowners, he was a well-educated, sophisticated Palestinian. The new owners are young Palestinians, far more Americanized in their basketball jerseys and workout pants. They've made some changes.

In most of the little local stores, the candy rack looks like this:


They still have one of those, but next to the cash register, the new guys have added this:


They tell me this display of yuppie chocolate sells well. Interesting. It has taken a long time for rising San Francisco land values to impinge on the immigrant, impoverished character of the Latino Mission, but the success of this new product line tells me a lot about how the 'hood is changing.

Yet another bishop visits the Mission

The Most Reverend Martin Barahona, the Diocesan Bishop of El Salvador and Primate of the Anglican Church of the Central Region of America, is visiting San Francisco. Our little Episcopal parish of Saint John the Evangelist had the privilege of hosting him Thursday. We took our guest on a walk through some of the sights of the neighborhood, grit and all.

Bishop Barahona has drawn flack from conservative U.S. Episcopalians, some in his own province, and some of the other Anglican primates for participating in the consecration of a partnered gay man as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. He's not a person to shy from the disapproval of some in order to serve the wellbeing of the many. A Central American bishop of conscience hardly could be. Apparently he found the shocking Robinson installation a no-brainer. He wrote:

I participated with a sense of solidarity with the marginalised, for whom I have fought for many years. I have fought for the social, economic, political, religious, racial and migratory marginalised; and now for those marginalised by sexual preference. I am totally convinced that Christ has always stood next to the marginalized, and I try to follow Christ even though I am a sinning man. I am very clear that God calls us to exercise a ministry, and God knows all of us best. Who am I to correct the plan of God?

On our walk with the Bishop we stopped by the murals in Balmy Alley that, among other themes, demonstrate how closely the Mission neighborhood has long felt linked to struggles in Central America.


The murals include a chilling angle on El Salvador's Oscar Romero.


Serious conversation followed about how our little parish can help Bishop Martin's efforts. Fr. John Kirkley of St. Johns listened intently. The global economy forces mass migrations of people looking for work to survive. How can those of us who enjoy relative security welcome and assist those set in motion by these impersonal forces?


We were also able to offer Bishop Martin a chance to see the work of St. John's Educational Thresholds Center, a community youth development project operating in the facilities of Marshall School. Once upon a time, years ago, SJETC was a project of the parish. Today it’s a Mission district anchor from thousands of parents and children.

As Ario Salazar explained to the Bishop that they'd been teaching the children the essential Mission District skill of telling the difference between homeless poor people and dangerous drug addicts and predators, one of our party whispered to me: "Maybe they could teach the whole country that distinction?"

We then visited the Mujeres Unidas y Activas in the Women's Building on 18th St. The MUAs help Latina immigrants to support each other to find their feet in a new country and to work for their communities. They had discussions of a possible exchange with Salvadoran women who are working in Bishop Martin's country to help prospective immigrants understand the realities involved in coming to the United States.

Two bishops in the Mission in a threeday span, both in the 'hood out of concern for our immigrants. Must be something good in the air!

Candlelight vigil for immigrant rights

At the end of a long day of immigrant May Day marches yesterday, I wandered over to 24th and Mission for an early evening candlelight vigil. Aside from a few children whipping about, the small crowd seemed a little tired and perhaps a little fearful. This wasn't the enthusiastic, happy gathering I'd seen in the morning. Folks shivered a little in the cold, held their candles and listened to speeches calling for open borders, amnesty for all workers, a chance for their children.




I was surprised and very happy to notice Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus and Sheila Andrus standing on the edge of the crowd, without fanfare lending their support to immigrants asserting their humanity in a strange land. We Episcopalians are fortunate to have new clerical leadership that seems to know where we belong. Bishp Marc has written about the event on his blog.




I didn't stay long. And I doubt anyone did. Most of those kids were going to school in the morning -- another day in the lives of people who have to fear, accurately, that they have no rights.

May Day: Oakland, CA, 2007

It sure is a pleasure to see our contemporary working class breathing new life into the international labor holiday that started in this country. Today, despite contrary headlines, thousands of immigrants and friends, took part in a march that stretched out for over a mile and took some 25 minutes to pass me on its way from the poor barrios of East Oakland to the downtown federal building.


This year's themes were a demand for cessation of raids on workers that tear families apart -- and for immigration reform that provides a plausible path to legalization.






Many folks seemed simply happy to be together, speaking out for themselves in the sun.


Others were a picture of determination!


As is usual when the nanny takes the day off, the children came on the march.


Mexican and Central American immigrants have a lot of friends, especially those who have experienced arbitrary U.S. government attention since 9/11.


Supporters of the fired Woodfin Suites Hotel workers were out in force. Twelve courageous housekeepers asked for the legal minimum wage they are entitled to -- and got canned on April 27. Follow the link to donate to the Hardship Fund and join the picket on Thursday, May 3 at 5 pm outside the hotel in Emeryville.


Immigrant workers who come together in these marches feel their strength -- there's an unanticipated force pushing up from the ground level of our society and we better get used to it.