Remembering Futures

This is my public face. This is where I undress my consciousness and being, for it to withstand the scrutiny of anyone who cares to judge. This is incomplete, organized, messy, re-organized, meaningful, and coincidental. This is human. This is probably not a great idea.

[rememberingfutures]

Anarchism and Place

I’m just reading an introduction to a chapter on China in a book about anarchism. This particular chapter has some special promise for me. As I have grown more and more familiar with anarchist history and principles, I’ve seen it more and more as a reflection of myself, and an ideological place in the world for me. As I’ve tried to share this with other people, I’ve been confounded by the responses I get from friends who more or less fit the description of “radical”, or at least, “counter-cultural” millennials. A prominent theme in the response is that anarchism is narrow, unrealistic, and overwhelmingly white, in the sense that it is exclusive of all non-anglo-whiteness.

This is hard for me to wrap my head around. My experience with anarchism came from studying my own Cuban heritage. Anarchist groups in Cuba played a huge role in creating a class consciousness for workers in Cuba. Cuba’s anarchism was hugely successful among agricultural workers. Most notably, Cuba’s anarchism spearheaded the solidarity of workers above race, and united recently emancipated slaves with white workers towards the end of a better future. The Spanish loyalists or capitalists didn’t really have that kind of an impact on race relations, and the Marxist communists also did not particularly contribute to this.

But the experience in the United States produces this impression among people, somehow. I admit that, having grown up in Miami, in a community that was around 90% Cuban, I didn’t really interact with anglo-whites much. So whatever culture there is in the U.S. that made the anglo-centric impression of anarchism on people is one that I may still, to this day, not be well-acquainted with. My experience with anarchism began with my own heritage and has a very Latin American character to it. My experience with it is tied to place.

This is what makes me appreciate this reading I am doing, which emphasizes the relationship between anarchism and place. It provides a critique of many anarchists’ tendency to promote anarchism as an expression of human nature, and a universal human thing. Preaching anarchism as universal can, honestly, come off as rather arrogant, and if that’s what the experience may be, for example, of a young black man who is subjected to the preaching of a white “anarchist” college student, then I can begin to understand how this may be the origin of how minorities relate to anarchism in the United States. 

Painting anarchism as a universal human experience makes it ahistorical--that is to say, it ignores the contexts that produced anarchism in modern European history, and transformed it in every continent on the planet, as people around the world made it their own. Anarchists don’t tend to be “Eurocentric” in the popular sense of the word at all, but when some anarchists present anarchism as ahistorical, it makes it difficult to avoid placing the European thinkers known as the “sages” of anarchism on a pedestal. It makes it difficult to recognize anarchism as a practice, and a revolutionary fire that has spread across continents, because it might be often presented as a static philosophy of the Enlightenment. It is far from static. Its strength lies in its adaptability. It does not prescribe a path to revolution. It advocates above all else that the people must make a path of their own choosing, and a path of action. This lies in contrast to the classical Marxists’ historical positions, that propose a deterministic view of revolution coming with the “inevitable” collapse of capitalism, and that a committed “vanguard” of people will be responsible for creating the shape of the revolution on behalf of the people.

Well, whoop-dee-doo, white dudes majoring in poli-sci, I’m suspicious that the responsibility for this superficial aesthetic of anarchism is your responsibility. Yeah. Thanks for that.

One more thing to point out about this reading, which I find interesting, is the critique of “Eurocentricism” being cliche. 

Anarchism is arguably the most consistently (even naively) universalistic of all the intellectual products of Enlightenment thinking in Europe, and needs to confront contemporary challenges to Eurocentrism. On the other hand, any such confrontation requires also that we recognize problems with the term “Eurocentrism” itself, which is used uncritically as a cliché in much contemporary writing in Cultural Studies. The products of Enlightenment thinking themselves have histories, modified in time and place. Anarchists, like other 19th century radicals, participated in the circulation of people and ideas across the length and breadth of Europe. Nevertheless, two of the greatest thinkers of anarchism, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were themselves products also of Enlightenment thinking as it was filtered through the concerns and experiences of imperial Russia in the middle of the 19th century, and brought their own experiences into their formulations of anarchism.

This is refreshing. I have long sensed a problem that I couldn’t articulate with the frequent use of the term “Eurocentric”, or the spirit of it, even, that is present in the calls of “cultural appropriation” that can be heard frequently in our society. On the one hand, a part of me agrees with and understands the sentiment and motivation of such concerns, but another part of me always senses something very logically inconsistent with the popular concept of cultural appropriation. It doesn’t always feel right. It feels like it is somehow inconsistent with the principles defended by those invoking it. I don’t like the inconsistency. We need and should demand better of ourselves in understanding oppression; it is often a matter of life and death and I would insist that there is no room for lazy, undisciplined thinking with this. There needs to be a clear set of principles, and a constant examination of all speech and actions to make sure that they line up with those principles. The use of “Eurocentric” and sister concepts should be placed under high scrutiny. 

To get back to the relevance of this thought to the passage quoted above, or my thoughts on anarchism and this reading, I’m getting to be able to articulate that things need to be historicized, and that we should be able to recognize how many trends, ideas, and objects exist in multiple cultural spaces and do not belong to just one group, in one context. The authors here argue that anarchism should be historicized. It is a product of the European Enlightenment, but that does not mean that minorities in the U.S. should reject it as something that exclusively serves Europeans. It has a history. People in Spain were moved by the writings of Proudhon, and they brought anarchism to Cuba with them, where it responded to local conditions and transformed into a practice and philosophy as original to Cuba as the blood in my veins (which, incidentally, also has origins in Spain, but that doesn’t make me any less Cuban.)

I’m reminded of an article I read recently that had enough of this cognitive dissonance to make me cringe, even as empathetically recognized the author’s demands and needs. If we can recognize that Puerto Rican or African-American girls with brown skin in the U.S. have a tradition of wearing necklaces that feature their names, that doesn’t imply that everyone outside of this identity wearing nameplate necklaces has no ownership to the tradition. There are people from the middle east who claim a tradition of wearing them. I grew up with many, many white Cuban girls who had it around their necks as well, irrespective of social class. As far as I understand, Italians also made use of nameplate necklaces. Eastern Europeans have worn them for decades. People commented on the article explaining that in the UK, they too have made use of them for a long time. A lot of these groups have used them decades before the 90′s, which is the period of experience this author uses in her life to produce this article. 

All this to say, that it should be possible to recognize the author’s experience without making the mistake of insisting that it is universal. While she offers a history of the nameplate necklace in her piece, it is obvious from the nearly unanimous disagreement with her in comments, and multiple commenters corroborating each other’s experiences, that she doesn’t dig as deep or as far back into history as she should to get an appropriately put her personal experience into the historical context. She brings to us a story of her experience, and the singular cultural meaning of the trend that is relevant to her experience. She brings us an origin of the trend that produced it as a cultural experience she owns. But she is unaware of other identities that claim ownership of the trend in their own experiences, and she argues that her experience alone is valid because of it. It isn’t the only valid experience, but it is an important part of the historical evolution of the significance of nameplate necklaces. Is it cultural appropriation for white women to wear these necklaces because a trend in it was inspired by Sex and the CIty? Maybe, if what concerns us about cultural appropriation is the exploitation of culture for self-interested or superficial motives. But if a tradition is owned by many cultures, then how do you decide whether someone is appropriating your own culture simply by looking at them? That “white girl” wearing a nameplate necklace could easily be Puerto Rican, Cuban, Israeli or Jewish, Palestinian, Lebanese, Ukrainian, or even a white American who inherited the necklace through conventional cultural means, rather than from a sale at the mall. It can be difficult to draw the line between cultural experience and superficial exploitation on a trend with a diverse history, and the rhetoric one might choose to reassert ownership of their own history can unintentionally appropriate and monopolize that history from others.

The phenomenon of how anarchism is perceived by minorities in the United States as an artifact of “whiteness” has so much in common with that whole nameplate thing. I would argue that minorities in the United States that feel suspect of anarchism are a consequence of anarchism being ahistoricized; they aren’t aware that anarchism is ours, as well. It has a long, diverse story, and the anglo history of it in the United States is not the only history, nor is it even an overly-important part of it.

[rememberingfutures]

Thoughts For California Voters

I would not presume to publish something and call it a voter guide. There are lots of organizations where multiple individuals have collaborated on putting together multiple perspectives to create such things. I’m just one person, and I would caution anyone to be swayed by the ideas of just one person. Still, voting is confusing in California this year. Most voters, in the Bay Area, at least, have over 20 different items to be aware of, because of all the propositions and initiatives on the ballot. My ballot is four pages long. As a person who leans strongly towards anarchist philosophy and maintains a concern and interest with urban policy, maybe my views come from an unusual enough place that my thoughts on what we have to vote on this year can be interesting or useful to people. Some friends have shown curiosity in knowing what’s rolling around in my head.  Well, if that’s the case, just short of 24 hours before you might need it most, here is where I stand on our election items!

I’m coming up on a decade of love for The Town. I am sometimes afraid that Oakland is no longer the city I fell in love with, but I’m still here, and I’ll do what I can to make a voice for myself while I am.

Measure HH: Grocery Tax, or Soda Tax?

The two campaigns on Measure HH have been almost as obnoxious as the Presidential campaigns have been. I don’t even have TV, so I’m not even considering how obnoxious commercials must have been. Just the mailers, phone calls, texts, and web ads have been plenty. A month ago, I was really very confused about this whole thing and thought that the “grocery tax” and “soda tax” were two separate issues. Maybe you did, too. Welp, you’re wrong. Both of these phrases, indeed, refer to the same fucking thing. Isn’t that annoying?

Measure HH is actually best described as a soda tax. The opponents to this measure are calling it a “grocery tax” so that they can run a (reeeeaaally yuge) campaign against it, trying to scare people into thinking that their groceries are going to get more expensive and local grocers will go out of business because of the measure. It’s crap. They have no evidence to believe that. There is evidence, though, to think that this tax of a penny per ounce on sweetened beverages will work well enough to provide a greater good. The city of Berkeley has already passed such a tax, and an examination of its effects reveals that no one’s groceries are more expensive for it. This article in Forbes summarizes the findings of a study on this in Berkeley and reveals that consumption of sugary beverages has decreased by 21% in low-income neighborhoods (where public health officials are most concerned about the impacts of sugar on health, and the onset of diabetes in children). Consumption in general of soda has fallen by 26%, and of sports drinks by 36%.

The point is that this works, and helps meet goals that public health experts are working towards. It promotes a healthy society, and it promotes democracy by reducing the unjust influence that large, corporate soft drink makers have on lower-income communities.

On Measure HH, I will VOTE YES.

Measure G1: Equitability for Education

Measure G1 in Oakland is a tax of $120/parcel, with exceptions for low-income, single-family home owners who live in their home. The money goes to the Oakland Unified School District, and will be used to raise teacher salaries, and expand arts programs, as well as some other things. I like that this tax maintains an exception for low-income, single-family homeowners, because this is a sector of people in Oakland that are at extremely high risk of displacement by rising costs. It is also historically a large sector of people in Oakland, which has a history of being home to many lower-income residents. At the same time, the measure aims to use money to support arts programs, which have been shown by research to create a large positive impact on students in general, and can notably help students who deal with violence, trauma, or the hindrances of living in low-income households.

I am no expert on the circumstances of education in Oakland. But I do know that OUSD needs a lot of help. I have some concerns about the increasing migration of wealthier classes of people into Oakland, and how that might combine with a school district full of charter schools. As better-performing students get accepted into charter schools, underperforming students, who often have class circumstances (and therefore, race) in common get segregated into certain public schools that increasingly lack the resources needed to deal with their population of vulnerable students. It is a good idea for the district to get more money from a tax that protects the families whose circumstances this measure will hopefully address. It is a good idea to increase teacher salaries and give hard-working teachers the resources they need to be able to fully commit to education in Oakland.

Also, no one submitted any argument against this. No one hates this idea.

On Measure G1, I will VOTE YES.

Measure JJ: If You Rent, This Is For You

Measure JJ does a few very important things that might make the difference to help you keep living in Oakland. Everyone knows the rental market is insane, and landlords all over the city are pouncing when they can on pushing current residents out, because they can easily ask for $1,000 or more per month for many units in Oakland that are being rented for a lot less, right now. Of course, if landlords got their way, it would be a disaster. Not only because many people believe it would be unjust, but the results of such sweeping displacement of people would create tremendous economic inefficiencies that affect the displaced, and by extension, the whole local economy.

The main thing Measure JJ does is protect tenants from illegal rent increases. Many renters aren’t sure of their rights and might tolerate illegal rent increases. Others may allow these abuses by landlords in order to avoid trouble by appeasing their landlords, which, despite their victimization complex, have a disproportionate amount of power in the landlord/tenant relationship. Measure JJ requires landlords to petition the city before they can ask tenants for any rent increases above the inflation index. It also requires the city to send information to tenants on their rights annually, and requires landlords to provide info to tenants on their rights, and instructions to appeal, whenever landlords ask for rent increases. It also keeps the city council more involved in the activities of the Rent Adjustment Board, and will make it easier for tenant advocates to get information relevant to their cause from the city.

Basically, are you a renter? Then you will vote yes. I will VOTE YES on Measure JJ.

Measure II: Measure What?

This is a little heard of, mostly administrative change that is a bit too boring to get the attention of most people, but it actually can make a very important impact on the life of Oakland. This measure authorizes the city to lease property for a maximum of 99 years. Currently, the city can lease property for a maximum of 66. Increasing the maximum term does two things. It helps the city hold onto property for the public benefit, and it makes it more feasible for developers to build affordable housing with the longer lease term.

I will VOTE YES on Measure II.

Measure KK: Infrastructure and Affordable Housing

This measure is meant to raise funds for the city to produce some massive infrastructure improvements. It’s a bond, and will be paid back by property owners in Oakland. It is estimated to add something like $100 or so in taxes per property, for most people. It varies on the assessed value ($250,000 assessed value would make it around $65, for example). Is that too much? Can homeowners in Oakland handle it? Is this bond funding improvements that benefit Oakland residents in areas with shit infrastructure, or is it going to end up funding cosmetic improvements in trendier areas?

All questions I have that are shared by others. According to the East Bay Express, this measure mandates the creation of a citizen oversight committee to ensure that funds are spent fairly, citywide. That’s an interesting thing that doesn’t sound common, and maybe we should move this forward to see how it will work? I can’t be sure that this is awesome, but Oakland is really, really needing some help on fixing roads and sidewalks, which is what most of this is for. Some of it will also help reserve land for affordable housing construction. I say go for it.

I’ll vote yes.

Measure LL: Who Polices the Police?

We do. We police the police. Measure LL establishes citizen oversight of the OPD. A citizen commission would be established to keep watch over the department. Don’t worry, it won’t fill up with cops: none of the people on this commission can be former or current law enforcement. This is a place for the community impacted by policing to exercise power. There are critiques. It isn’t perfect. But it is an important step, and lots of public professionals and activists agree on that much, at least.

Hell yes I’m voting for this. I’m voting yes.

Alameda County: Measure A1

Alameda County has just one measure on the ballot: Measure A1. It’s a $580 million dollar bond to support programs that assist low and moderate income people with home ownership, and supports that production of affordable rental housing. You know what’s going on here, and you know we need this. Sounds like we have a lot of bonds to vote on, yes. But that’s what happens when you abandon public infrastructure spending and exacerbate social inequality at the same time. It’s gotta get fixed. Not paying then means paying more later. If we’re okay with some people getting rich at the expense of everyone else, then we are going to have to pay for the money we gave away to the rich. Shruggety-shrug-shrug.

Vote yes on this. I’m voting yes on Measure A1.

BART District: Measure RR

Oh man, oh man. BART is seriously falling apart. Think about it. Really think deep, and imagine what it means that hundreds of train cars are running at the same time, depending on electrical components and structural pieces that are over 50 years old in a region where seismic activity is common. Think about 400,000 riders, per day, depending on a system that can’t get replacement parts because they don’t make them anymore, and can’t expand service because the software control systems for the trains can’t handle it. A system that can’t run more trains because the braking and acceleration distances of the current trains are too long to run more trains closer to each other, safely. Watch some Youtube videos. BART is held together by band-aids. And it’s doing, who knows, maybe twice the work that it was built for, right now.

What’s that? You commute by car and rarely use BART? Okay, sure. What do you think happens to almost half of a million people if they can’t take BART? How do you suppose they will get from point A to point B? Without getting into the economics of transportation or reasonable facts about how cities don’t work without transit, because roads usually don’t have the capacity to move that many people, I hope that you find these questions as scary as I do.

We’ve gotta fund BART. I’m VOTING YES on Measure RR.

California Propositions

Oh my God, there are so many of them. It’s a perfect-storm of democracy being a nuisance. Your vote for president may be statistically, almost meaningless in terms of its democratic value, since your vote doesn’t really represent your choice… but for these propositions, go nuts. You have a little more power here. Exercise it. I’ll write less about these because I want to finish this post before lunch next Monday.

Prop 51: Sounds Good, Right?

Education bonds. Governor Brown says no... I am inclined to trust his pragmatic judgment despite the long list of supporters. One huge concern is that it's high stakes to approve this much state spending considering how much debt the state is paying off for education bonds already... given that the impact may not be as great as some might expect: it is expected that the largest or wealthiest school districts with most resources will have the largest ability to take advantage of this cash, and it might not benefit low-income communities as much as we would hope. I might agree that bang for buck isn't super great on this. Also there are local measures for education spending. Not just brown, but the Green Party as well opposes this measure, and East Bay Express. Allegations exist that this is a measure that promotes construction of new sites over rehabilitation in a way that favors developers and might be irresponsible.

I will vote NO on Prop 51.

Prop 52: MediCal Funding

Prevents MediCal funds from being diverted to other programs, and extends a current program that secures MediCal funding. Whatever it is that will happen with health care, it needs to be paid for, so I’m voting yes.

Prop 53: It’s a Trap

When I read this, I felt suspicious. This measure requires voter approval of large, infrastructure-related revenue bonds, which currently don’t require voter approval. Voter approval is NOT always a good thing. Revenue bonds are the kinds of bonds that don’t require additional taxation, like some of the Oakland and Alameda bonds that I’ve written about above. An example would be a bond intended to fund a rail station, where money from fares (revenue) are used to pay back the bonds. With how controversial the high speed rail project has been (because Americans hate trains) and how committed certain people are to opposing this project (even at this stage, which makes it costlier), it’s easy to suspect that Prop 53 is the kind of thing supported by the opponents of public projects and infrastructure development (because developing society actually has opponents, for some reason) so that they can use it to shut down projects like high-speed rail. Maybe they can even still use this against the high-speed rail project somehow. I don’t know. On this one, I have about 20% research and 80% speculation. But I don’t like it. It might sound good on the surface, but functionally this might not be a great thing.

I’m voting NO on Prop 53

Prop 54: Government Transparency?

Oh man, I dunno. I’m going to vote yes. This could have some unintended consequences that might work against your interests because of the way politics tend to work to get shit done. But it’s hard to argue that transparency is not a better way to do things, so I will vote with my principles and hope the growing pains this might cause are negligible.

I’m voting YES on Prop 54

Prop 55: Progressive Tax

The EBX's text on this says it well:

In 2012, when Californians were trying to climb out of the Great Recession, voters approved Prop. 30, a modification to the state’s income tax that slightly increased rates on people earning more than a quarter-million dollars a year. It was a crucial move that staved off billions in cuts to schools, prevented massive tuition hikes at our public universities, and stopped budget tightening that would have devastated our safety net health-care programs. It was a smart and just decision to ask the richest Californians to pay a little more. But Prop. 30 is set to expire in 2018. Prop. 55 would extend the “millionaire’s tax” for twelve more years.

Vote yes. I’m voting YES on Prop 55

Prop 56: Fuacate, and It’s Done

Boom. $2/pack tax on cigarettes to significantly boost MediCal Funding. Makes sense. I’m voting YES.

Prop 57: Keep Kids Out of Prison

Right now, prosecutors get to decide if they want to try juvenile defendants as adults. This rolls that back and gives judges that decision. This also is aimed at reducing the prison population, which isn't prison abolition, but it's a step on the way. You know who's opposed to it? Pretty much just prosecutors and cops. Vote Yes.

I’m voting YES on Prop 57.

Prop 58: Bilingual Learning for Everyone

Repeals some bad laws that stopped schools from having dual-language programs. Would create more bilingual students! Facilitates the learning of English giving local districts more flexibility, and benefits English speaking students by giving them the option to be a part of a dual language program, too.

I’m voting YES on Prop 58

Prop 59: Authorize Lawmakers to Pass Resolution Against Citizen’s United Ruling

Send a message. Vote YES.

Prop 60: Porn Regulation

Man, I dunno. It’s hard to say what the best way to go about this is, so I am trusting the East Bay Express with their opinion on it, and voting no, based on this proposition being poorly designed and claiming to affect actors in the industry in ways that it can’t. There is a lot of convincing evidence that this isn’t really a fact-based proposition.

I will vote NO on Prop 60.

Prop 62: Repeal the Death Penalty

I would call myself a prison abolitionist. This doesn’t go that far, obviously, but it prevents the state from having the right to execute people. It is hard enough to justify the killing of a person by an individual; it is unjustifiable for the state to kill. A bureaucratic process designed to execute people, who are sentenced to death by a frighteningly imperfect justice system, is an extremely unethical thing. There is no role for a death penalty in a healthy society. I don’t believe there is any role for prisons, either, and I wish that repealing the death penalty didn’t mean that the alternative was life imprisonment without parole. There has to be a less resource-intensive, more constructive way to deal with serious criminal offenders than this. I have a friend who voted against repealing the death penalty because he found the thought of life imprisonment to be a great deal more abusive than death. It’s possible that some on death row might agree with him. But if the goal is to dismantle the prison system and find a more constructive way to address serious crime, we can’t get there without repealing the death penalty and revoking the state’s authority to directly exterminate the lives of its constituents. We should reject the notion that such a determination can be made through state apparatus, justly.

Repeal the death penalty. Vote YES on Prop 62.

Prop 63: Regulating Gun Ammunition

Restricts and regulates sale of ammunition. Vote Yes. It's not perfect, but can hopefully decrease gun fatalities and injuries. There is a part of this that makes stealing a gun worth less than $950 a felony instead of misdemeanor, which... I mean, I don't know why punish that particular, specific thing so harshly in a policy designed to address a broader issue… especially while California works to decrease the number of non-violent offenders in prisons… and also knowing that felony convictions lock people out of the economy. But overall maybe still yes. Or no. I don’t know. Up to you.

I dunno.

Prop 64: Legalization of Recreational Marijuana

Historic Moment. Tough Choice. This has got some issues. But it may be that the net benefit outweighs the harm. One thing I don’t like is that it allows and seems to encourage advertising, which… I mean, fuck advertising. I don’t like advertising of alcohol, tobacco, or prescription drugs, so why would I like the advertising of marijuana, in any case? Decisions on drugs and mind-altering substances should be made by people and their medical advisors, and people deserve to be free of the influence of advertising. This might be unstoppable to begin with, because I know brand advertising of marijuana products has been growing in the medical industry, as well, so it may not make a large impact that this proposition encourages it.

But there are other problems. I have read it bans the growing of plants outdoors. Period. Why? Even in your own yard? Californians registered as cannabis patients can grow in their yards, now. Why roll that back? Or will that stay in place for them and only apply to recreational users? What will happen to the prices of marijuana? How will this affect the medical marijuana system? Are we seeing the beginnings of a massive cannabis industry, on par with tobacco? Or is this the beginning of legitimizing the “greener” use of hemp as an industrial alternative to a variety of products including plastics, animal products, and fiberglass? Will the general population just chill out for a fucking minute if this is passed?

I haven’t researched Prop 64 all too much, so it’s hard for me to say in detail. I did read enough to convince me that the greater benefit of this bill outweighs my concerns, and I hope groups that share my concerns will work to improve cannabis culture in California so that it is guaranteed to always benefit people more than corporations.

I will vote Yes on Prop 64.

Prop 65: Plastic Bags, Wildlife Fund?

This is bullshit meant to confuse you about the two plastic bag propositions. Do you want to put the bag money in a wildlife fund? It doesn’t matter. This was put on the ballot to divide the attention of groups who would be focused on supporting Prop 67 to ban plastic bags. Grocers are a large part of the coalition to support the plastic bag ban, so the plastic bag lobby (yes, there is that. It is a thing.) put this here, threatening the revenue they get from the ten cent bag fees, to divert their attention. It’s also there to confuse you into, perhaps, voting no on both of these. I think it’s easier for me to just leave this blank.

Prop 66: The Opposite of Repealing the Death Penalty

Some of the argument against capital punishment is that it is too expensive. Well, for the people who feel it is too expensive, but also find themselves having very low regard for human life and a high degree of trust in bureaucracies and institutions, Prop 66 is here! It basically kills people faster and cheaper. What could go wrong? I am voting no on this vile abomination.

Prop 67: The Real Plastic Bag Ban, But For Real This Time

For fuck’s sake, our legislature voted on this already. It’s only here because the plastic bag lobby (again, hello) forced a referendum to try and veto it. Don’t let them get away with this bullshit undermining of our Californian democracy. Show them that it happens to work better here than in the rest of the states. The plastic bags aren’t helping anyone out, just get rid of the damn things already. Even the people giving them away don’t want them anymore.

I WILL VOTE YES ON THIS. “YES” is a vote to UPHOLD the BAN on plastic bags.

Prop … oh, wait. That’s it.

HOLY CRAP. That was a lot, without even going through the persons running for office. I bet you’re already good on that. Most people spend more time on candidates, but I tend to like the policy stuff. That’s how I’m voting on all of this. I hope that was of help to someone. Or, I hope it gave you a window into my brain, if you ever wanted one.

Remember to look at other sources if you haven’t already! Trust our local East Bay Express, and trust the League of Women Voters. Women are half of the population, so the League of Women Voters tends to be non-partisan.

Good Luck!

[rememberingfutures]

Op-Ed: The Displacement Bomb Set to Explode San Francisco... and You’ve Never Even Heard of It

Your rent-controlled home and neighborhood small businesses are standing selfishly in the way of progress according to the proposed Affordable Housing Density Bonus Program.

This editorial is the kind of misleading, flawed reasoning that gets people fighting against their own interests and against "progressive" interests in San Francisco. It's remarkable to me that we can be so stubbornly myopic. "People will be displaced if we build housing!" "It's like the 50s, 60s and 70s all over again!" "Affordable housing isn't REALLY affordable!" "We're losing rent controlled units!" etc.

There is this inherent privilege within these kinds of arguments that frame this entire issue as a struggle between "genuine" San Franciscans, who apparently feel they have the right to decide who gets to be in San Francisco, and basically everyone else in the world. Like mean girls deciding who gets to sit at their table in the cafeteria. Their arguments come from a place of privilege, and concern themselves with privileged minutia at worst, and the side effects of our problems at best. They will complain about AirBnB and Uber and brag about how they take taxis and stay at hotels, when AirBnB and Uber are decentralized platforms being used by hosts and drivers precisely because they can barely afford to live and their economic situation is dire (I'm one of them). They confuse demonstrating against a Google Bus or two to highlight class displacement in their neighborhoods for a Quixotic quest meant to take the buses down all together (to what end?). The tech industry is full of dickheads and the culture is not my cup of tea, but you can't just blame tech for everything. What are you trying to do, anyway, fight exclusivity with more exclusivity? Does that really make sense?

I often feel quite alone with my view that the workings of capitalism are to blame, here. In our sophisticated phase of capitalism with wealth being highly concentrated and inequality being so glaring, what the fuck else do people expect to happen? There is a class of people fortunate enough to cash in on the wealth of an economic boom, a small city with miles of bureaucracy preventing it to adapt and grow, and then everyone else being forced to compete for resources with that wealthier class. Spoiler: the ones with more money always win in capitalism.

Housing is a resource everyone needs, and it's a resource that doesn't run out. We have the power to build as much of it as we want or need. There is absolutely no justification for homelessness. If housing is scarce, then we should look at the processes that manage and produce housing. If private land owners are showing class bias against people who don't work in tech (which they are), then rather than criticizing planners and the city for trying to do what they can do about it, which is small fucking potatoes, you should be asking for more. You should be demanding that room be made for everyone. You should be questioning why profit motives are driving a market for such crucial, basic need, when it's clear they aren't adequately producing what is necessary. You should question the notion that a person's home isn't truly their home, because they live in a society where you can only claim that security if you are wealthy enough to buy it, but the ability to build wealth has been severely limited (in other words, question why "rent" is what we do, and if there's a better way to do this). You should be demanding that buildings be taller, and that precious square footage be used for housing units rather than luxurious floors dedicated to concierge levels and fitness rooms. You should seriously question the concept of land ownership, and land as an investment.

I always have many thoughts that I can write about on these topics, but I gotta go bring in the bread, so I'm out of time for rants and ruminations. Maybe one last thought:

It would be much more effective for you to contemplate these things above than it is for you to pretend that you're helping brown, black, poor, or other marginalized people by waging a war against a tech company, or lamenting the days when your favorite car wash wasn't slated to be replaced by an apartment building. It would be helpful if you didn't succumb to the strange whiteness in this "genuine" San Francisco privilege, and tried to fight exclusivity with INCLUSIVITY instead of more exclusivity. San Francisco "progressives" now act like things were good before, and they want to go back. Things weren't good before. They were good for *you*. Stop depending on myopic personal viewpoints for understandings of social issues that affect millions.

[rememberingfutures]

I was just struck by a thought on why I have felt so much more scattered and anxious about everything in ways that I never used to. Why does even something like blogging regularly seem like a herculean task? I felt dissatisfied simply reading through this last post. 

It’s in my personality to be an unfortunate perfectionist, and I don’t think that’s combining very well with the stress I am under. I’m concerned about all sorts of basic needs, and I think I have been underestimating the impact of these things on me:

I’m not sure that I can afford rent each month. (Especially this month.) 

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to afford to eat for the rest of the month. 

My phone was disconnected for not being able to pay the bill, which precludes me from certain kinds of work that require a mobile phone. 

My car needs maintenance and may be on the verge of some kind of a breakdown. This could preclude me from much work that requires a vehicle.

Most of the jobs I find don’t pay enough to make a living from, so it takes a lot of energy to consider and attempt to coordinate various flakey, part-time gigs.

These are seriously immediate concerns. Unemployment Insurance exists for this. But California EDD probably hates me. I’ve been technically receiving unemployment insurance benefits since February, but I’ve seen no more than $38.00 from them. They send me certification forms late, and unfortunately, it takes time for me to account for each detail of the money I earned from various day-jobs here and there, since there are so many sources and they want details for each.  Then disqualify me for mailing them back late. At some point, I also made some kind of a mistake that disqualified me from funds as well. I don’t know what it was, they didn’t explain, and trying to get a hold of them on the phone is such a pain that I just left it alone. I don’t trust them and don’t depend on them. Though it would help if I could. Without that, I’m often in an anxious, defensive, reactive state. 

That’s depleted the pool of mental and time resources I have to dedicate to my ultimate goal of finishing my Bachelor’s Degree. I have bad credit and have no family members with good credit, so private loans are difficult to impossible. FAFSA isn’t super cooperative, either (long story). I need to apply for grants and scholarships as well, but that seems so daunting after spending all my energy trying to figure out how to pay bills.

[rememberingfutures]

It had been two years and six months since I had been back to the city I was born in, and I was slowly forgetting the part of me that was made there, three thousand miles away on the face of a different ocean. I used to see my family there every year, but the San Francisco Bay Area economy has become hostile. Once my patron and savior, it has become like a neglectful and abusive lover. These have been hard years. 

Facing long-term unemployment and hundreds of job rejections changes one’s personality. I have personal experience with this depth of poverty now, unprecedented in my life. My organized, disciplined, optimistic life has been under siege by the forces of poverty--disarray, apathy, self-loathing. In this state of being, the obstacles and challenges that I would choose to face in life are not the pressing issue they should be; they have become a luxury, and a dream. Where many comfortable Americans might be satisfied in that they are working in their chosen careers and suffering through problems that are a part of their calling, I have toiled to simply pay the ongoing ransom being asked of me in exchange for that life, under threat of homelessness and snowballing debt. Many people take vacations from work. They relax or pick up hobbies in their leisure time that they can put on display for the world, as quirky expressions of their personalities. For a person like me, when work is done, all I have is more work. Working on passions, dreams, and future careers is what I have to do when I am not working to pay for shelter and food and the participation fees for life, because it is the only chance a person with a vision gets to progress in these things. Unfortunately, because employment options seem to be so limited, finding hustles is a herculean task in itself that leaves little energy or time for distant, abstract things like life dreams and goals.

The emotional and mental consequences of this are significant. (Hell, even the physical consequences are significant. Who wants to pursue a disciplined exercise and health care regiment when you’re already at a deficit of energy for merely surviving?) I have an amazing romantic partner who I met in this part of my life, and she is more supportive than I imagined a person could be. I have interesting friends and acquaintances that have their own inspiring quests and poetic struggles. But an amazing person in my life and an interesting set of peers doesn’t make up for the loss of legacy and tribality I have from being separated from the network of elders in my family.

I didn’t realize how much I needed this until after being deprived of it for two and a half years, and listening to my partner’s reflections on meeting my family after we had trekked across the country and spent time with each of the family members that have helped make me who I am. At the deepest layers of my being, I feel like a black sheep anywhere else but with my family.

Being Cuban American anywhere outside of Miami already is enough to make one feel a little misplaced, but even within the Cuban American community, my family has a less common experience. They were rural poor, leaving via clandestine boat trips back when the most notable emigration vehicle was the series of U.S. sponsored flights off the island for middle class Cubans known as Los Vuelos de Libertad. I might imagine when an American tries to picture a poor Latin American, he imagines a timid person with little room for ambition, made such by a lifetime of oppression. If that’s true, then Americans who don’t know Cubans would likely be a little surprised at the attitude and temper they will find in our people. Our legacy is of a people with cojones. My guess is that, among other things, the long legacy and far reach of anarcho-syndicalism had great effect on how the small population of the island thinks. This was expressed in fiery personalities far more often before the Castro Regime beat down the Cuban people and forced Cubans to be more savvy about how they expressed themselves. My grandfather is the kind of guy that takes matters into his own hands and has little patience for anyone’s shit, and by the end of the 60′s, he decided he was done putting up with Castro’s shit. I think being of an unusual class of emigrants for their time may have been a cause of their different attitudes and lifestyles from others in the Miami exile community.

But there’s something else, as well. My grandparents are a clever couple. Even at their advanced age (an average of around 90 years old), they are ridiculously sharp. They have a record of thriving in very inhospitable times. I wonder sometimes how they might have turned out if they’d had more than a third grade education. It seems that their children have inherited this knack for being uneducated intellectuals, and that my generation, their grandkids, has also inherited this gift. I’ve also discovered in recent years that I can accurately describe myself as an introvert, despite the ease with which I can charm and socialize with others. Now that I think about it, my family members also seem to share this facility with, but lack of interest in, people. It’s no wonder that my family is a set of people that remain very close with each other.

Once I heard that my grandmother was re-diagnosed with lung cancer and she would undergo surgery to remove a tumor, I became fraught with anxiety. Here I was, struggling gravely on the other side of the country, totally penniless and unable to afford an increasingly expensive plane ticket to go see her. The thought of my grandmother passing due to complications was a heavy burden. She was like a mother to me when my mother was too burdened to be a mother herself. I cried and cursed my circumstances. I knew I needed to make this happen. If my grandfather could flee Cuba, surely I could find a way to complete a much less risky journey, albeit more than three times as long.

I guess that’s where my grandparents’ legacy to me kicked in, and I found a way in a less than hospitable situation. The fucking airline industry wanted $600+ for round trip airfare in July. There was no way around spending that much. But I could definitely get a better value for that cash. Being with my grandparents was the ultimate goal, but I decided I could connect and reconnect with old friends on the way. Maybe I could still hope to recover pieces of the person I was before I found myself trapped in this poverty that made the Bay Area feel like my prison.

Yes. I would take Karla with me, not just because we reject the idea of being separated from each other for three weeks, but also so that my family could meet her, and simply because life should be about adventures, and adventures should be shared with loved ones. We made our plans together. We would take a bus from Oakland to Los Angeles to visit a dear friend of hers, wait there for the Amtrak Sunset Limited, which we would take on a long ride to New Orleans, and explore New Orleans on the most meager budget. From there, we would take a bus to Tallahassee, where I could meet a dear old friend of my own, then rent a car one way, destination Miami, with a stop in Jesup, GA, to visit my father. We would remain in Miami for 8 days before taking a one way flight (the ONLY cheap flight we found in July) back to San Francisco. 

I suspended my search for long-term employment, and used temporary jobs and Instacart gigs to save money for the trip. I couldn’t find a subleaser to stay in my room while I was gone, which put me at risk of failing to afford August’s rent after I return. I decided that I had been imprisoned here in Oakland for too long and that the risk was not a price too high for me to pay if it meant reconnecting with grandparents that, at their age, won’t be around much longer. 

The whole thing was definitely worth it. We adventured through Los Angeles, the two day train ride, and New Orleans, mainly surviving off of grocery store purchases with my SNAP benefits. Many of our evenings were spent either recovering at our AirBNB room from a long day, mixing drinks using Trader Joe’s whiskey poured from steel water bottles and playing a classic game of Serpientes y Escaleras, or exploring nightlife with said bottles of secret whiskey in hand. We had a couple of meals out in Los Angeles when company demanded it, and we focused our funds for that on a few meals in New Orleans (because, come on) and of course, in Miami. Being Californians despite our origins, you can bet we took some bud with us, and an edible brownie to make sleeping on the train more comfortable. 

I had never gone from coast to coast on land. I appreciate having an awareness of how vast the landscapes are from the deserts in the west to the grass and swamps of the south. Traveling this way creates adventure. I would have pushed the limits a little further, shrinking the budget by trying a bit of couch surfing and sharing the cost of the car rental by picking up riders for the drive down Florida, but Karla wasn’t as desperate as I was to make it cheaper and didn’t feel comfortable with it.

When we pulled up to my grandparents’ house and they opened the door, I cried. I hugged them and cried. I never want to be separated from them for that long again, as long as they are around. Here began the amusing process of Karla getting to know my family, and me getting to know myself through Karla’s observations. 

Part of what I picked up on this trip from that, and from revisiting things like old places and old yearbooks, was an improved sense of self-esteem and restored faith in myself. Things are hard right now, but I can do this. 

I want to write more about that, but I should be less hard on myself about my writing (among other things). I’ve too often become concerned about how palatable my writing will be to readers by judging it against the writing of others. Am I focused on topic? Is it a good topic? What’s my presentation like? I think for now I am going to be okay with free writing, like this, to let my natural inclinations surface again. I’ve become unhappy with how some of my thoughts have been expressed in this Tumblr. They seem to lack authenticity. I am going to try not worrying about it so much and just posting from my personal perspective in hopes I can progress. To anyone who read all this: thank you. This Tumblr doesn’t really have many readers. I’m not trying to collect readers or hustle to market myself, either. I’ve been writing to give people a window to my soul, and to show some authenticity to the occasional hiring manager that clicks on the links in my email signature and ends up here. Whoever you are, I appreciate your interest in reading. I hope I can give you something worth your time if you come back.

[rememberingfutures]

I changed my Tumblr theme accidentally and lost a dozen little specific changes I made when I went back. Excuse anything that might look weird. AGHGHH

[azspot]

Video Games Are Better Without Characters

[rememberingfutures]

From today’s vantage point, it’s hard to explain how strange SimCity felt back then. The game that started with nothing, an empty map. Stupidly, I placed a square residential sector in the very top left, mistaking the barren, terraformed environment for something akin to a word-processing document. Then another, then some roads, forming a rudimentary grid. They remained empty, flashing their disapproval. I had no idea what I was doing.

By the time I realized that the residential districts required access to electrical power, some of the game’s more complex dynamics suddenly piped in like Muzak from the store’s beige walls. I figured out how to select a power plant from the game’s toolbar (this was years before I’d use Photoshop) and realized: Nobody wants to live next to a power plant. I resolved to place my coal plant (the only one I could afford) further down the map, and then connect it back to civilization with a meandering path of power lines. The question of what to do stuck with me, even though I had to leave the mall and abandon my fledgling city.

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment.

This was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves. It changed games forever—or it could have, had players and developers not later abandoned modeling systems at all scales in favor of representing embodied, human identities.

This is fantastic. It’s about more than just the title, or that excerpt. I was, however, one of those kids who spent countless hours researching the ways to make a city of Sims thrive. It was maddening, at first, to not understand why everything would turn to chaos so soon in SimCity 2000. Very gradually, I came to the point where I innately understood the relationships between the variables affecting the game, and could transition a city from an empty map to a sprawling metropolis with great ease.

In my early 20′s I moved to the Bay Area and experienced a radical lifestyle shift from life in Florida. As I thought more and more about what my new urban environment was made of, I remembered SimCity and obtained a copy of the more recent SimCity 4 title. It was more complex and I could barely get started without failing at something. The challenge was, again, maddening. And so countless hours, too, were spent in those years of my early 20′s figuring out SimCity 4. 

Will Wright’s creation is one of the cocktail of influences that created my adult perspective and interest in urban topics. It helped train my brain to look for patterns and relationships, greatly developing my problem solving skills. While I was obsessed with figuring out Sim-world, I also happened to be obsessed with discovering what my new home, the East Bay, was made of; I wanted a list of factors that contributed to my vastly improved quality of life. What I learned about the game city helped me ask the right questions about the real city I was discovering, and vice versa. It was an excellent thought laboratory. 

I agree with the writer of this Atlantic piece, that the video game is an excellent medium for developing perspective on systems. In that capacity, I would argue that it’s appropriate to call it an educational game, though it isn’t directly educating by delivering content, like the old Reader Rabbit games did, for example. An awareness of things bigger than ourselves is lacking in American society, contradicting as it does the mythology of individual freedom that we worship, here. I’m afraid this might be our greatest obstacle to overcoming our 21st Century obstacles and becoming a technologically mature society.

Please, read the article.

[damienhaaas]

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[whomthegodswoulddestroy]

REBIBLIOBARGLIN FOR TEXTUM BOOKUMS

[rememberingfutures]

An outstanding and long list of free literature.

[rememberingfutures]

Robert Reich: Why Work Is Turning Into a Nightmare

The new "sharing" economy is really about sharing the scraps.

I am glad to see Robert Reich comment on one of the mysterious, potential futures we might find in walking paths ahead from the current state of plutocratic capitalism we live in. We have very short attention spans. We have our hands full enough with problems in the present, so that we forget what happened yesterday, and we find it difficult to look forward and build society constructively.

In the microview, many of us are satisfied with the extended opportunities made available by infrastructure laid down by tech companies. But we shouldn't forget why we found ourselves in this position in the first place. As Robert Reich explains, if the traditional job market really offered what it should, being an Uber driver or a Taskrabbit wouldn't really be all that attractive to many people. In other words, it's likely that you only drive for Lyft or whatever because you can't find a job that is worth keeping. A lot of jobs disappeared from our economy and aren't coming back. Part-time jobs with no benefits and stagnated wages that people can't quite live off of very well have replaced them, as well as service work enabled by tech, which is a welcome relief in the face of alternatives. A lot of those jobs had become somewhat miserable in the first place because of American workplace culture, but that's another story.

In the macroview, the growth of this "sharing" economy could mean, in combination with other factors, a part of an economic transformation that most of us wouldn't welcome. As AI develops and bots can be used to automate certain kinds of work, that leaves a lot less work to do in an economy that unrealistically expects everyone to work. (A fully employed society is already impossible, so think about that next time you see a homeless beggar and you feel like telling him to "get a job".) This dystopian future is one where you have less freedom over your work, because you acquire the work as neatly-packaged tasks. You perform your tasks, perhaps as part of a more complete project which is pieced out, partially to you and partially to bots, for maximum cost-effectiveness. When what you do can be simplified enough--when there are few enough variables that a bot can take it on, then perhaps you will need to move on to another sort of task. Or maybe not. Perhaps you will be an owner of capital, or an engineer of turking systems.

It may seem ridiculous to some that I suggest sci-fi futures be taken seriously. To others, it might seem alarmist for me to reflect in writing on tomorrow's bad news. I would accuse all those people of lacking clear sight. we are living in yesterday's sci-fi future. Every week a handful of important scientific breakthroughs or discoveries is made. We live in a present where wealth inequality is a grim, life or death reality. The notion that a non-moral approach to economics is the key to greater things prevails. People are commodified. Democracy is dysfunctional; plutocracy is principal. Where do we go, from here?

[rememberingfutures]

Remembering Futures

Serial Fiction. Part 1

Laura rubbed her eyelids. Her pupils retreated in the bright morning light, the honey hued irides rushing protectively. For a moment, her mind is still spinning, suspended in dreams. The disconnectedness fades into that unforgiving self-chiding that one feels when grasping at dreams forgotten. Her brain connects with her body.

Every morning, it's the same few moments before she recovers from sleep. There are variations. Sometimes her eyelids are sticky. Sometimes her feet are cold. Sometimes there is wetness stuck to her face ending in a corner of her mouth. But the sunlight, and the sense of loss, are both the same.

Laura folds her blanket away from her body, and sits up on the bed for a moment before standing up--an effortless aggression on gravity by her youthful muscles. She walks to the kitchen. Strange, long fingers on small, wide hands grip the lid of a self-sealing kitchen jar, and twist it open. She smiles, and is not yet tired of the novel hissing sound made when opening the jar. She only bought the quartet of jars last week. It keeps her coffee fresh. She loads the old-fashioned moka pot and sets it on the stove top.

She has her favorite radio play from the kitchen speaker, and brushes her teeth while the music flows into her ears. After finishing her toast, salmon, and coffee, she dresses herself in a flash and is out the door. She doesn't take too much time to make herself up, and indulges in the secret pride, glad it means more time to lazily enjoy the morning.

The elevator ride from the 33rd floor is long, with neighbors from lower floors boarding at several intervals. She gets off at the second floor lobby of the building, and exits into the warm sunshine coming down from the east between tropical towers of glass. The Metrowalk is covered in a dance of color and motion as other residents from nearby towers step onto the elevated walkway on their own small journeys, all too often crossing vectors with Laura. She weaves through them like an expert. While passing through the Metrowalk Promenade, Laura purchases a copy of the Miami Herald from a thin old man with a moustache. The date is November 28, 2051, but the air feels no cooler even as they approach winter. The animated single-page Herald presents a large image of the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant, and an article-link featuring debate on whether or not the plant should now be shut down. She tucks the newspaper into the gaping, crescent mouth of her over-sized purse.

--------------------------------

Fermin rubbed his eyelids. There was no sunlight penetrating the blinds over his window. Winters in San Francisco are mild, but sunlight is scarce. Sunlight is scarce, particularly in the early morning before the late sunrise, and it is often as weak as the winter is mild. Mild is the term generally used to describe it, but Fermin always thought that it was cold enough.

Cold, rainy, cloudy.

He whisks the blankets off of his legs, and heads for the window to look outside and confirm his suspicions.

Cold, rainy, cloudy.

He attempted clearing his throat. His mouth was dry and his throat ached. That blasted old fashioned radiator--charming as it was, it vented a foul, rusty dryness into the air for the first few weeks of use every winter. He scratched at his stomach under his white t-shirt, made certain that his silk boxer shorts weren't revealing anything too private, and stepped out his bedroom doorway, announcing his entry into the kitchen with a long, jaw-stretching yawn.

No one was in the kitchen. The dim blue of pre-dawn light allowed his eyes to adapt to wakefulness in this gentle haze. Nico had either left deliriously early, or not come home since last night at all. "No Nico, no car", thought Fermin. He brushed crust out of the corner of his eyes and flicked the switch that turns on the kitchen lights. His mind still in a haze, his body knew where to go to get a cup of coffee. It even knew where to get the box of tea tucked into the back corner of his spice cupboard when he made the discovery that his kitchen stored coffee no longer.

There he sat, on a stool at the bar in their kitchen, sipping at earl grey tea. It was a taste he had acquired from an ex-girlfriend. Just before the memory of that girl began to fill his heart, it stopped. It was overpowered by a dream memory.

It was something like the light of a star in the sky being muted into oblivion by the much more urgent warmth of a rapid sunrise. He couldn't remember the ex-girlfriend's face, anymore. All he could remember was the face of that girl in his dream. It came to him with immediacy. It was a dream demanding to be acknowledged before being condemned by the waking mind into the subconscious, forever. Too often he lost dreams this way. Fermin had read somewhere on the internet that all of us dream several dreams every night, but he doesn't usually remember too many of them. Sometimes something would occur as the day progressed that would trigger a dream memory. Too often, those were very unclear memories. This time, all he had was her face, and pleasant emotions for her.

After tea, and a quick shower, he patiently chose his clothes--nothing fancy today--and mentally checked off items he needed to take with him as he grabbed them, before closing the front door behind him.

It isn't a very long walk to the MUNI station at Ocean and Jules.

In his office, Fermin ate lunch at his desk. In a quiet moment, his mobile phone switched into making a cacophony of sound. The most annoying alarm tones provide the most motivation.

“12/2/2011 - Call Massachussetts Group”

Such urgency in the alarm to do something he couldn’t care less about. Why do we need to work? Is it a waste of a human life, for it to be spent shuffling information and communications around that don’t improve anything, anywhere, except for maybe the bank account of a few people here and there?

“In a society where we define ourselves by our occupations, what am I?” he wondered. “Consciousness is so fantastic and complex, and we waste it on this bullshit.” But what else can he do? It’s all just a trap to make you someone else’s resource. He didn’t like playing the game, though it was the only way he knew how to survive, for now.

--------------------------------

Many of the people on the Metrowalk that morning were hustling to get to other destinations. Some were walking from their homes to offices. Others were walking to the Metromovers. Laura was exactly where she needed to be. She had come to observe the hustle that had become the center of her city. It was an example of resiliency on a planet that was unpredictable. The hurricanes continue to come. Waves cover what were once roads. Beaches that were once the pride of our city are gone, destined to become an old fairytale.

And yet, the city core remains standing in a shallow ocean full of loss. Thousands of homes were consumed by the new tide. Hurricane Leydis swept the tide inland. Practically overnight, our old way of life became an impossible memory. It seemed a fitting fall for such a gaudy city. Miami had entertained great wealth. Its people liked shiny things. It was a harsh wake-up call, but when it came, old politics were discarded and the city came together.

It was a fascinating story to Laura, that she wanted the world to see through her eyes. Her great-great-grandparents had come to Miami with their children fleeing their beloved island of Cuba, because they had a sense that the old Cuban Revolution was not going to bring about the kind of life they wanted for their children. Taking refuge in the United States was the dream for that generation, but it wasn’t until their grandchildren were adults that the dream of a free society was recognized as a delusion. Laura’s grandfather was a storyteller. He passed their family’s legacy on with great care. There was an intensity in his presence that she has been the heir of. He made sure she knew about her great-great-grandfather’s character; he was fearless in danger for the people he loved. He carried a torch with him that had given his descendants an inextinguishable fire. It made her great-grandfather a most stoic renegade. Her grandfather: a contagious, revolutionary flame. Her mother: an unyielding, pragmatic optimist. Laura carried them all inside of her and had set out to change hearts and set fires, as was her inescapable destiny.

She walked several blocks on the Metrowalk, searching for the right photos. Dramatic, tropical hues and curved glass made the city appear bright and happy. The collection of towers at the city core had become so dense that it was sometimes easy to forget there was a vast ocean just East of them.

Laura stopped walking and leaned against a side-rail. She put her hand into her oversized bag. While she considered taking a shot, she gently rubbed the side of her thumb against the ridges along the surface of her camera. She pulled it out of her bag, faced its small lense away from her, and squeezed the metal strips on each side of it between her thumb and index finger. The camera made a clicking noise to indicate that it had finished storing visual and depth information for the scene. She made a fist around the tool and stood for a moment, looking down over the edge of the Metrowalk at the ocean beneath her.

Back at home again, Laura dug into her favorite armchair while she searched the saved, three-dimensional scene from earlier that day for the best scenes to extract. The soft glow of her tab--a rectangular, digital display about as wide as her forearm is long--was the lone source of light in the room. She didn’t stop working until well beyond the other windows on her floor had gone dark. Sleep took her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It isn't a very long walk to the MUNI station at Ocean and Jules.

Laura felt a cold spray on her cheek. She walked on a grey street, under a grey sky. She could see the ocean! But… it wasn’t like her ocean. It was a grey ocean under a blanket of grey mist. The muted, pastel pinks and blues of the quaint wall-to-wall homes on either side of the street seemed quite bold in the midst of all this greyness. As if people were afraid that bolder colors would startle neighbors.

Nico? Who is Nico? She felt as if she clearly knew someone by the name.

The grey walk ended at a quiet and windy intersection. It was a bus stop. No… there were rails in the street. I’m waiting for a train.

An ancient looking train lumbered through the mists into view. Fantastic. It was also grey--a silvery grey color with a red stripe running along its lower half. Its old-fashioned, square headlamps were on, but did not penetrate the ambiguous greyness. She stepped inside as if she knew this train.

She sat in the train for a long, noisy ride. At first, it was through a neighborhood of more houses painted in understated colors. Rows of them, side by side. Then historic storefronts, and vintage persons on the sidewalk.

Oh, wow. Look at them! Their clothes!

The train kept going. Laura was captivated by the dated scenery. Finally, the train moved faster and metal noises became louder as it approached a tunnel. The foggy greys of this cold morning suddenly switched into blackness. The window Laura was looking through was now a mirror, reflecting back to her the inside of the train car.

Her face was not her own.

A man with sad eyes stared back. He was around her age. Broad brush strokes of his dark, full hair pointed in various directions. It was messy, but he was kinda cute. She didn’t know him, but somehow, she wasn’t surprised at seeing him.

--------------------------------

Fermin looked at his own face in the reflection. And today as well, his self-doubt was picking fights with him. He distracted himself by watching the others on the train. The City was full of colorful people. He wondered why some articles of clothing remain unchanged across the decades. A man with greying hair wore a trenchcoat that could have been made forty years ago. People don't look twice at the trenchcoat, but would raise their eyebrows if he had overalls or ultra-wide jeans under his coat. Go figure. He guessed he would prefer the trenchcoat, too.

His cell phone rang.

“Hey… what are you up to?” asked the voice on the line.

“Hi! I’m just getting into work. Aren’t you in class?”

“It’s my planning period! I just called to ask if you would meet me later tonight with some coworkers. I don’t want to have to go alone.”

“Of course. I’m done here by four today, I hope.” “Okay. Call me later!”

“Kisses. Bye!”

He hadn’t been seeing her very long, but it seemed promising.

Apathy about his job drove him to dive into the internet, exploring his thoughts. The articles he found interesting alternated between optimistic futurism and current events. Technology seemed to be making many promises. Maybe environmental damage could be reversed. Who knows where we will be in 50 years?

[rememberingfutures]

You don't measure a man by his failures or by how many times he falls, but by how many times he is able to get back up again.

My father, in a letter to me. July 5, 2009.

[rememberingfutures]

I have been an advocate and user of linux systems for ten years. Linux has always been more stable and provided a better experience for me than its more popular corporate counterparts. Open source software allows for a fantastic development ecosystem, that allows you to treat software more as infrastructure than a product.

I recently downloaded Clementine music player to try as a replacement for Amarok, which has managed to just slow everything down, lately. Clementine is modeled after Amarok, and has even more features. It looks better, and it seems way leaner. It reads various file formats and lets you export in various formats. An Android app is available that acts as a remote control for the player, too. This is great.

Amarok had trouble staying quick while searching external USB and network devices. I haven't tried that with Clementine yet, but I'm very happy with it so far.

It's multiplatform, so it's available for Windows, too. This isn't just a good music player for linux; it's my favorite music player, overall. Linux software is great because it's created with no profit motives, so it only does what you want it to, and nothing more. That sounds good to me. If that sounds good to you, too, try the Windows or Mac download at the link.

[rememberingfutures]

I. Can't. Stop. This is so clean. When this was released, I wasn't yet even a teenager, but I was at an age where kids start paying attention to music, and the 90's offered plenty of it in music video form.

Regrets aren't something that I ever truly carry, but as a figure of speech, I do regret not diving into this when I was much younger. In the mid-90's, peer pressure was putting its weight on elementary and middle school kids to self-catagorize into one of two identities: "rocker" or "rapper".

I was a kid that had no fucks to give about that. I was doing my own thing. I picked up on some hip hop, was getting into grunge, but also had a fascination with synthesizers, space rock, Santana, and early electronic oddities that weren't in pop music. I was learning the trombone and liked brass, too. I didn't see why I had to identify. But everybody knows it feels good to be "in" with a crowd, and when enough time went by, I just related more to grunge. I was a lonely kid.

Growing up in Miami in the 90's means that the local culture was largely about Miami Bass. I dunno. I just wasn't into that. One would think that a kid into weird electronic music might appreciate a genre that, as I listen to it now, seems to share a lot of DNA with Detroit Techno. Maybe it was the over-hyped pink Ferraris and sexualized lyrics. Oh, I had sex on my mind plenty as a kid. Not even the W.A.S.P.s running the school they put me in could stop that. It wasn't quite that it was sexual, but the way it was presented. It just wasn't epic. It was so repetitive and boring. How many times were these guys going to ask this chicks to take off their pants? "Damn, son. Shut up and just go get some somewhere else," is what I imagine ten-year-old me had to say about that.

Meanwhile, in Oakland... people were growing up with these guys. I have a long-buried and recently exhumed memory of  Mista Dobalina. I never knew that some of the other rap that made an impact on me back then came out of here, too. Ever since moving here, I've discovered and rediscovered hip hop, and am listening to it more regularly than I ever have before. I would have never imagined hip hop to be this interesting when I was a kid. Yeah... I would have been on it too.

The Coup, Hieroglyphics' associated acts, Los Rakas, Dr. Octagon, Blackalicious, and DJ Shadow are a few of the regional locals that I've been listening to a lot, lately.

This stuff is epic, revolutionary, hard, imaginative, and original. Miami's Bass scene was... well, just dull. I wish I had this in the 90's.

[rememberingfutures]

A Letter in Support of Commuting My Father's Prison Sentence (4)

This is the final piece of this long letter. I can finally get this whole thing off of my chest. I am not sure if it will do any good. I hope so. See the previous posts below: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Spoiler alert: you can keep reading, but you’ve already read the most absurd sentence in this entire letter: my grandparents came here from Cuba so that their kids might grow up in a place with a fair justice system, where the innocent aren’t treated as criminals. My father never came home. His rights were violated in trial, witnesses were dishonest, and I saw with my own eyes a very biased judge ridiculing and picking on his defense lawyer. I suppose I don’t need to waste ink on the legal details of this story, though. I’m sure that you, the reader, have a stack of paper describing every last detail, already. You can read there about how the prison industrial complex of the United States destroyed my father’s life, damaged his health, and stole an irrecoverable decade of time from his life. This letter is about how the justice system destroyed his family. So I will continue with more personal details. I abandoned my classes in the last few weeks of that semester­­ when my father was taken­­ to assist in editing and preparing my father’s story for his defense attorney’s reference. I failed all of them but my piano class, which was peace and therapy in the midst of the normalcy collapsing around me. My credit cards maxed out and went to collections. My GPA, lowered by the failures that semester, disqualified me from some financial aid. Transferring away to school was no longer an option. Financial aid for my local schools was difficult, too. If you tell your financial aid office that your parents have an income of $0, they will just point out that your family income last year was a lot more than that, and tell you to file an amendment. By the time that’s ready, financial aid deadlines have passed. You’re set for the following semester, but be prepared to get audited by the FAFSA folks just about every year. They just can’t seem to believe that you have two parents with no income, and want you to give them details. They forget, so you should do it often. I did it twice. Providing evidence of absence is frustrating. Too bad there wasn’t a form labeled “Victims of the Prison­ Industrial Complex". I’m sure it would have been easier to fill out. Even with financial aid, I needed full­time work all of a sudden, and my university schedule was full of conflicts with that. So I quit the university to go to community college, where they expect you to be poor and working full­time. I got to go through fun times with financial aid all over again. My relatives helped my mother sell our home. This whole experience was very traumatic for her. I worried she was unable to support my younger sister, who was just halfway through high school. I stayed with my paternal grandparents, as I did the last time my father was incarcerated. When my mother stated her intention of moving my sister across town to a different high school, I took her to live with me at my grandparents’ house. I thought if I could save her from even just a few of the struggles I had gone through building my educational career and ending it in a train wreck­­, any and all efforts would be worth it to help her escape the gravity of this Federally­managed black hole consuming my future. I took her to school in the mornings. I made sure she could spend time with friends outside of school. I paid fees the way a guardian would. I bought her glasses, once. I tried my best while working two jobs and going to school. We didn’t have much money and neither did grandma, but there was a lot of love in that house, and it was comforting. I didn’t see a way out. I had no post­secondary degree, no money to get one, and minimum wage jobs paid me just enough to keep my car on the road and pay about $120 to a car insurance company each month. Car insurance is expensive when you are 23, male, and vulnerable. I spent a year looking for a way to advance, but I just kept sinking into American poverty like it was an inescapable quicksand trap. Struggling made things no better, and soon I would be stuck without escape. I needed to get out. My sister and I grew very close in this time of struggle and I cried many tears for my needing to leave. I felt like I was abandoning her. I felt guilty. But she cried for me because she saw my trap, too. Her and my grandparents knew I had to leave. So I did. At this point, finally, my immediate family was completely fragmented by my father’s incarceration. Him, taken by the indiscretions of a biased and corrupt justice system. My mother, retreated to the company and comfort of her own mother after this trauma. My sister, finishing high school with the limited assistance and unlimited love of our grandparents, and without a parental advocate. Myself, thousands of miles away in a gamble to break all those odds in sociology textbooks that are against my favor, for the better of myself, my family, and what offspring I may have, some day. I left Miami for a better future in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Ten years later, I’m still being chased by debt collectors. I don’t bother to pay any of them. My father shares my name, so his debts follow me, too. The original debts have been inflated with hundreds of dollars in fees. Even if I had the money to pay them all, it wouldn’t repair my credit, so what incentive do I have? I’ve seen some financial success, but I’m still stuck in the gravity of poverty. It pulls me back. I’m competing in a job market flooded with labor, and their Bachelor’s Degrees always look better than my being a drop out­­even for serving tables or washing dishes. My horrendous credit makes school a near impossibility. Home ownership? Forget it. It is a huge consolation and point of pride that my younger sister was recognized as a talented artist and given a full scholarship to an art school so that she could pursue her dreams. Her adulthood has brought a different kind of isolation and struggle than mine did, but at least one of us can win the approval of society with that ever­ important piece of paper called a degree. The experiences that I have met as a result of the gross injustice committed by the United States against my family have been difficult. They have estranged me from society. Perhaps it is the poetry of the universe that I can consider just one positive aspect to these personal experiences. My eyes have been opened. I have been woken from The Matrix. I’ve grown far stronger than I ever imagined myself to be, before this experience. I’m fortunate to be an intelligent and perceptive person. Rather than directing the anger and pain of my birthright’s betrayal into destructive violence, I fueled a patient focus directed at discovering why. The answers to that question are overwhelming. They are everywhere, in everything, and across centuries of time. I’m in the company of few people now who can see truths in sociological patterns as clearly as you can see the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. I think this is a place that can only be reached by obsession, and hardship. It is the only gift I have received from this terrible crucible I’ve been made to pass. It made me re­baptized, radicalized, and revolutionized. So this is where the poetry of the universe lies. By the very functions of the oppressive and broken institutions of our society that aim to pacify and process dissent, have dissenters like myself been created. I will use any power that I have in the struggle to end the misuses of authority that put innocent men like my father in prison, and cause extreme hardship to their families. There are thousands of others like me. It’s very ironic. I’ve offered you a piece of my personal suffering. This does nothing to describe my sister’s suffering, and how she doesn’t have a strong relationship with either of her parents, because of these events. Nor does it describe the stress and anguish my kind grandparents have been caused. I haven’t written of the sacrifices that aunts, uncles, and cousins have made to save my sister and I as children and youth from being too damaged. Imagine all the lives of the people that have been impacted by this one man’s wrongful incarceration. Can you imagine what it is to be him, and have your brief chance at having a family revoked? Can you imagine the loss in your soul? Because if you can’t, and you are responsible for any part of this application process, then hope is without reason. This man is serving a life sentence in prison for a crime that never happened, between two government agents, involving fictional drugs, various trial errors, and a few dozen civil rights violations. Put an end to this sick joke, already. Give me back my family.

God Bless America,

Armando Garcia

[rememberingfutures]

A Letter in Support of Commuting My Father's Prison Sentence (3)

There was a huge gap between this and the last posting from this letter. I unfortunately became very busy in the grind for a paycheck. Please view the previous and successive parts of this letter here:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 He was working so hard to make up for lost time. I was in awe of how much he wanted to be a father, and a husband. When the subject was approached, I could see the pain and regret in his eyes. My father is a man that had lived years in a federal prison, been within a breath’s distance of dangerous people, and traveled difficult and remote Latin American landscapes. He talked about any of these things without flinching. Make him discuss his role in his family’s past and future, though, and he seemed like a shamed samurai. Regret, and maybe self­directed anger or frustration would leak out from his eyes, held back by tears that refused to fall. I didn’t know what it was like to have a father that was free to be anything more than a gracefully aging snapshot in uniform khakis.

I learned what it was. It was like a tornado in reverse. Building you a home instead of tearing it apart in its passing. Providing a whirlwind of security instead of a menacing threat of chaos. My father was there to make sure I had a home. He was there to support my education with a powerful push in any direction I wished to explore. He was there to pick me up from my live music performances when I didn’t have a car. He was there to settle the first and only (minor) car accident I have ever had. He was there to buy me a plane ticket to Orlando when I was panicking about missing my bus, so I could perform with university colleagues in performances for which absence would have meant serious failure, and perhaps expulsion from my degree program. It’s funny, though. Each time my father acted to support me, I was anxious about it. I was so used to not having that safety net, that my emotional response was always to expect something to go terribly wrong, anyway. But they didn’t. Things were looking up. I had no doubt that I would finish my education and make huge waves in this small pond of a world. But events didn’t transpire as I expected. What could have been a happy ending was not­­--courtesy of the United States government. We might have appeared to be a portrait of normalcy on the surface, but strange things were being set in motion. My father was no longer incarcerated, but he was not free. He had an FBI agent knocking on our door, calling his cell phone, and visiting him at work, asking him to involve himself once again in the criminal trade they had punished him for. These visits persisted for months. My father stalled them. As far as I can tell, while he’s always lusted after danger and adventure, he now felt moved by the need to reconnect with his family, and this was something he had no intention of sacrificing. He stalled them, but they kept coming. They reminded him that he was merely free by their good graces, and that they were the only thing stopping him from being deported to Cuba. I can imagine that at some point, he considered his options and reconciled himself with the prospect of doing work for the FBI. He agreed to be in touch with old contacts for them, but refused to travel. For a while, it seemed like this was under control. For a while.

One night, I came home from a late university class, and my father had not come home from work yet. That was unusual, but his job was demanding and he held a lot of responsibility. That night, my mother received a phone call. I don’t recall whether I spoke to my father myself, or if the message was relayed to me. I remember the shock and anxiety at thinking familiar words to myself. My dad is in jail. That night, or at some other point, I did speak with him on the phone. He was being held by the DEA. They were accusing him of conspiring to purchase cocaine. They didn’t believe he was working with the FBI, and the FBI was not being supportive. My father assured me that this was a huge misunderstanding, and that it would all be cleared up soon. I was anxious that something would go wrong when things went right, but now that things went horribly wrong, I calmly and wholly believed that in a month’s time, everything would be back to normal. I could continue my plans to transfer to an audio engineering school upstate. My father could accept his huge promotion at work, and manage the small company’s office in Okeechobee as a partner in the business. In fact, I could pay the household bills in his absence on my credit cards. Yes. That way nothing gets cut off and he won’t go into debt. When he is home again, he will make it up. He is innocent of what they’re accusing him of, so there is no way he will end up incarcerated again. This is the United States of America. My grandparents came here from Cuba so that their kids might grow up in a place with a fair justice system, where the innocent aren’t treated as criminals. (To be continued in a following post)

[rememberingfutures]

Survive.

[rememberingfutures]

The City, The Cycle, The Cafe

Revisiting: a point in the past

An imaginary moment in the mind

When I want to find a previous self

And ask forgiveness for my sins

Wood grain on the table

Black porcelain cups

Cables and Coffee

Typefaces and Tea

When the winds outside had weathered my light down to an insecure wisp

And the Oakland-sunwashed windows could not find me

The finest tiny fireworks fueled my return

On all acoustic frequencies the singing fires delivered

A song of all stories and forever: It is cold, and it is true that you are alone. When you remove all of the fixtures, there is nothing here. When there is pain, it is because you feel it. When there is sorrow, it is because you know it. But when you see the sun that rises, When you hold the face of a lover, When you look the man in his eye and see his secrets to tell him he is not alone, When you move fast between the pillars and trees and people and machines, There is something here, and you are not alone. The sea is older than you, and the tides go in and out. You are a small part, and this is a revolution. All of time is your time, and all the revolution is your revolution.

And my light becomes known, again.