The opinions expressed here are those of the author and should not be taken as medical advice. If you are having a crisis, you must reach out for professional help.

Going inpatient for a little while can get you temporarily out of a hard situation so that you have a bit of time to regroup, to reassess, to rest, to recuperate, and to reevaluate. Yet an inpatient stay at the hospital usually won't solve your problems.

A 72-hour hold won't get you out of a hard situation. When you get out of the hospital, you'll face the very same challenges you did before you went in.

For someone acclimated to help from the psychiatric care system, when life gets too hard it might be tempting to head for the nearest inpatient care ward. It is nice to think we could just be helpless and have the hard work of life done for us. It's never as simple as that.


You will have to relinquish some of your rights. Hospital staff will often make decisions for you. If you need the help, you should certainly go. But it can be hard to ask for help.

Speaking to a family member and/or a psychiatric advice nurse could be an effective way to determine whether you need an inpatient stay. If it is too difficult to do simple self-care, such as going to a store and getting food or other necessities, or cleaning up after yourself, it might just mean you should get a helping professional to help you with some of it. Or, if it gets bad enough, you might need to get a greater amount of help.
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My sister recommended the book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman. The New York Times review called the book, “Riveting… A superbly written tale of moral courage and political courage for present day readers who find themselves in similarly dark times.”

Riveting is the best word to describe Freedman’s writing. The Berkeley library has one hard copy and the Oakland library has the ebook.

My memory of Hubert Humphrey is his support of the Vietnam War, the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, and losing the 1968 presidential election to Nixon, who promised to end the war and then continued it for four more years until after he was safely re-elected.

Humphrey’s pivotal role on civil rights was completely lost under the weight of Vietnam.

I knew nothing about Humphrey’s early political life, especially how he addressed racism and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis as mayor, or how he changed history with his firm stand on civil rights in 1948. I associated the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson in 1964. Humphrey’s place in civil rights starts long before becoming Johnson’s Vice President on January 20, 1965.

The book title comes from Humphrey’s speech on July 14, 1948, at the Democratic National Convention. The issue was not whether the delegates would nominate President Truman for a second term, but whether the Democrats would include civil rights in the official party platform. Humphrey had 10 minutes to speak for the minority and convince the delegates to support the platform on civil rights. Here is an excerpt:

“To those of you, my friends who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late.

To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” -more-

In my previous article posted on December 2, I outlined a proposal for a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine. Now I wish to show why now is the right time for such a two-state solution to be considered by both Israelis and Palestinians. First, the popularity of Benjamin Netanyahu is at an all-time low in Israel. The man who posed as Mr. Security for Israel has been seen as ignoring or otherwise failing to heed warnings that Hamas was capable of mounting such an attack as they did on October 7. Compound this failure on Netanyahu’s part with Israeli citizens’ enormous opposition to their prime minister’s assault on Israel’s judiciary, and you have a situation where Netanyahu may finally be toppled from power. In recent polls, 41 per cent of Israelis want Benny Gantz to be the next prime minister, as opposed to only 21 per cent who want Netanyahu to remain in office. Finally, Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing coalition can be toppled by any of its coalition members withdrawing their support. People close to Benny Gantz have been urging him to withdraw his support and thereby topple the Netanyahu coalition. -more-

Worth Noting:

This is the last Activist’s Calendar for 2023.

The Design Review Committee meeting on Thursday, December 21, 2023 is the only scheduled public meeting until after the New Year’s Holiday.

City Council is on winter recess through January 15, 2024.

Reduced City Service Days, Tuesday, December 26 through Friday, December 29, 2023 follow the Monday, December 25, Christmas Holiday.

Check the City website for announcements and any emergency meetings posted on short notice at: https://berkeleyca.gov/

December 31, is the deadline to complete the Survey of adults 55 and older from the County of Alameda Area Agency on Aging to plan county services to assist older adults to age in place. https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CABERKE/bulletins/37d724c

Free Yoga Classes every Tuesday and Wednesday from 4:30 – 5:30 pm at the West Berkeley Family Wellness Center, 1900 Sixth Street, Register by phone 510-981-5350.



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BERKELEY PUBLIC MEETINGS AND CIVIC EVENTS -more-

With City Council on winter recess and most of the meetings for the year over, I turned on the audiobook version of McKay Coppins’ book Romney: A Reckoning and finished it in 2 ½ days while I put off writing and cleaned the house; which tells you where housing cleaning fell during the months of attending City meetings and writing about them. -more-

When Indigenous Land Notes Are Not Enough
A recent email from a doctoral candidate in the UCB College of Environmental Design concluded with the following end-note:

UC Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded Lisjan territory of the Chochenyo Ohlone.

For those critics who find these Indigenous declarations little more than "tokenism," there was another closing line:

A land acknowledgment is not enough, you can start by paying your Shuumi Land Tax. -more-

People who don't have a mental illness diagnosis are nonetheless susceptible to delusions. In the case of a neuro-non-divergent person such erroneous beliefs might be termed misconceptions, errors, mistakes, or illusions. And people don't judge it as sickness, and the individual isn't seen as weird. Everyone gets some things wrong, and this is often due to a bad assumption. -more-

In the program notes for San Francisco Opera’s current production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore -more-