Been awhile, so this will be a long one...
So, I'm out this morning, walking the dog around this rather fishy part of Berkeley, and the wind has kicked up, stripping blooms off the plum trees and sending their petals into my hair, and all down the street ahead of me like snow, and I'm thinking just how hard is the wind going to be blowing, a few years from now, when the climate has become unrecognizable? And what is anybody in government going to do about it? And what about all those mattresses, lying in the sidewalks, and all the funky weed-smoke, blowing through the air?
I live in a neighborhood where the new rentals are sky-high, new-bought houses gleam under fresh paint and rebuilds while old folks live in crumbling bungalows and hippie hollows remain in pockets, where homeless folk shack up in occasional doorways, where you smell more weed than tobacco, the "f" word is used far more often than the "d" word (but isn't that true everywhere?), where three teenagers were shot in their car about two blocks away, last night, no doubt supplying my rich neighbors with their stuff.
Nearby is bad old People's Park, where on a sunny morning stoned white women call other white women "honky bitches" and where un-savvy coeds who walk by alone at night occasionally get raped. In other words, good old Southside, which I avoided like the plague as a student, for all of the reasons above, except the gentrification.
Since the early '70's, this has been the armpit of Berkeley, but now it has pockets of zillion-dollar glitz: immaculate gardens with imported boulders, rebuilt interiors with priceless upgrades: the very wealthy living among the just-hanging-on, Yes, there is fabulous theater and vibrant food scene downtown, for those who can afford it, and two movie theaters where there used to be a boring old shoe shop and a department store. And street people everywhere, doing their thing.
Downtown Berkeley used to be a workaday, ugly Grover's Corners kind of a place, where kids (yes, of all races) could go around on their own without fear of seeing anything disgusting, or of being hurt or scared. Now, it's Pottersville: glitzy and either high-flying or low-life. The boring old Grover's Corners of the world went down with the middle class and import tariffs, and all we are left with are the very few, very rich folk, the mere remnants of that boring old middle class, worn down by careless officials and a whole bunch of hustlers dealing the real "opiates of the masses," namely weed, drugs, guns, alcohol, sex, tobacco, and lottery tickets.
But maybe if we are all kept distracted by this kind of outrage, we won't worry so much about the world that won't be there for our grandchildren, the winters that will stop coming one of these fine decades, thanks to the high-fliers who guarantee by the way they live that there will be no tomorrow, the people who break laws because they are different from those OTHER people (another scourge of Berkeley), who because they walk their dogs on (off-limits) beaches prevent shorebirds from having a shore to land and feed on, who because they run stop-signs and red-lights as bicyclists get into the same habits when they are behind the wheels of their BMWs.
Don't get me wrong: the blind pollution of Texans back home in their huge trucks and their callous attitude towards guns and race relations get my goat, too, big time!
So what will change about that in this election to come? Will we be electing a crazy new version of Calvin Coolidge or Andrew Jackson (that is to say, the current Republicans) or the same-old-same-old Grover Cleveland sort of crony capitalism under Hillary Clinton, or are we willing to go back to the stable, equal boredom of Grover's Corners under the Great Society man, Bernie Sanders?
Personally, I am willing to give up my whipped polenta with wine-lee glaze and start eating spaghetti and meatballs if it means seeing everyone living in a decent home getting decent care and kids getting training in meaningful jobs rather than being shot in their cars while selling drugs to rich (sorry, but it is the elephant in the room) Chinese students who can most easily afford a Cal education, which the the days of state subsidies used to cost (I kid you not) $250 a semester (or "quarter" in my day), and now is... what? $14,000? Are we willing to tax the heck out of the rich in order to support public education, public health and public transport systems, the way they did in the days of the "greatest generation?"
The answer is definitely blowing in the wind, folks!