Public Comment

When we look around us, at the world, at our neighborhood, at the politics of people we have met, we are often led to ask, what is happening to the world? 

It is not an idle question. We are told of crime and crime waves; we feel the rough edges of a possible lay-off; and we fight an inflation that the economists tell us is natural. Underneath it all, we know there are corporations making lots of money on rent level rises, downsizing work forces, and wars kicked up in corners of the world which give the weapons industry the ability to feed on both sides. We have an economy that has bounded over all fences and borders, as if there were no controls. It will even go to government and ask it to lessen the binders still placed on its corporate operations, to give it more freedom. And we wonder, is there a game being played here? Do we lose our freedom because big business has taken it away? Is that why we find ourselves imprisoned in a situation in which corporations find freedom? 

When the economy leaps over its fences, it destroys things – stuff like people, like relationships, lives, careers, and memories. And for some reason, we have been taught to think it is all okay. We are told not to worry. Yet worry we must, since an accident or misstep could throw any of us to the curb as homeless. 

For those who make hay while the sun shines, however, they may have doubled and tripled their power as their earnings go up. It may seem unconscious to them because it comes to them unceremoniously. It might be money they have dreamt of all their lives. They may be politicians who just take it and put it in the bank. After all, politics has become a money game, at least, for those who break the right rules. 

The mayor of Berkeley presents a picture of a man holding the world in his palm, and making hay, but is really a poor soul who feels he must retreat into a former self in order to survive. He pretends he is representing the people, yet we know he is beset by an ogre. A sizable percentage of Berkeley’s population are demanding that he represent them, and he refuses. These are people who are horrified by something happening in the world, and all the mayor can do is misrepresent it, call it by false names, and instruct the demonstrators to refrain from interrupting other people. Here is an example of his paraphrased dialogue. 

Speaker: In Gaza, over 30,000 people have been killed, 17,000 of them children. We can’t just sit here and let that happen. The US government is involved. It gives the killers their weapons. 

Mayor: Thank you, next speaker, please. 

Next speaker: Those who kill are killing a culture. That is genocide. It is not defense against anything. 

Mayor: Thank you, next speaker, please. I refuse to pass judgment on what is happening there. 

Third speaker: You fear taking sides? We as a town have been able to see the justice in many such disputes. We call forthrightly for a ceasefire, even though that is a compromise. What is happening in Gaza is a rebellion of tortured prisoners against an imprisoning administration. You have placed our town on the side of the prison guards facing a rebellion like that of Attica Prison in NY. 

Mayor: Thank you, next speaker, please.  

What kind of politician is this guy, this mayor, who thinks that if he can remain calm in the face of all the upsets and demonstrations that have graced his Council, that he will win? Win what? But we already know. He is running for state Senate in this election, and he sends out over email the names of those who endorse him. Still, he loses to Oakland, Richmand, and even Chicago, among the hundreds of others that have passed such resolutions. 

This is a mvayor who, when interviewed, makes tactful statements about not creating dissention among the people. But that is what he is doing. There are Jews in the city who claim to be attacked by others now; and there are Palestinians, both students and residents, who feel discriminated against. They both remain unheard, silenced, excluded from civil attention while the mayor plays his game. Discrimination will always undo equality. That is its function. He is evaluating the Gaza events as a war between equal powers. Yet he can do that only by refusing to listen to Berkeley’s Palestinian voices, who tell of rebellion, not war. 

When people rebel, they make a claim to presence that no laws or boundaries will ever hold back. What the Palestinians do in Gaza, they do out of desperation, to let the world know they exist. What they (and the rest of us) do is demonstrate in the hundreds of thousands in US cities is call on government to stop sending the bullets that are killing the Gaza people. They have met locally in the hundreds at Berkeley City Council meetings, and have written a “People’s Resolution” on Gaza events, signed by well over a thousand Berkelians. They are establishing the right of the people to govern when their government fails in its job. 

One thing is clear. The once progressive town of Berkeley, CA, has ended up officially supporting genocide. It is a genocide that is facilitated by large bombs, smaller bombs, snipers, military hunts for the living in the rubble, a destruction of all hospitals in Gaza, and a general starvation imposed by stopping all shipments of food and water into the area. The prison administration called Israel goes to whatever length it seems necessary for it. 

The politicians who make a lot of money through their policy-making, and put it in the bank, or invest it in stocks, somehow think it will be safe there. Yet all they have done is reposition what they think they own. When the crisis that begins hitting all others will reach them is no longer up to them. Maybe they think there will always be more, since it now sloshes around in government circles, cluttering up all conversations. 

From the fears and anxieties that lead people to do crazy things, like suicide, or acts of violence, or loud unhealthy arguments, they lose their new-found wealth. It is taken from them silently, even secretly, by the quiet force of inflation. Against that, they have to fall back upon myths. We hear these myths from them all the time: that the people are doing well, that the US government is a prince on a stallion, guarding the people of the world from its many Satans, that there is justice in the world. And when thinking about Gaza, many find they can only believe those myths, and end up telling lies about them. Some of them believe it so intimately that they grasp on a former life, look at it as in a mirror, like something that could have a mirrored meaning. 

The mayor is one of those. He has led the City Council through its legal process, questioning how to deal with the hundreds of people who have shown up at the City Council meetings, demanding that their government pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire. Yet even that remains a compromise. It gives both sides equal status, which is what Israel will not give to its prisoners. 

Some people have seen through all that. It just doesn’t work for those who step out of the box. They call for City Council to hold a hearing to decide what kind of statement the city’s government should make. Who knows, it might even vote a resolution down. Yet the mayor even refuses to think about doing that. His multiple refusals become a real anti-democratic stance. Or perhaps, it is something he is selling to higher-ups in the Democratic Party, for endorsements. 

Well, his opponent, who is also running for CA Senate, is really strong. She’s black, a seasoned politician from Richmond City Council, who does not even take an extra breath to proclaim her opposition to what is being done to the Gazans. She doesn’t promise to do things. She just does them, and then talks about it. And her hole-card is that she does not take any donations from corporate interests. She gets her money from the people; it is a move designed to convince all those who vote for her that she will actually represent them. 

The mayor gets his money from rich interests, and from higher-ups in the Democratic Party. They are who he will represent. Indeed, he gets that as an imitation of federal financing, where money is all that has value – especially in an election between a Biden and a Trump. Either this mayor is spineless, or he has seen the riches at the next step and is going for them. 

All those who have endorsed him need to take a better look at his corruptions (plural). They would be better served switching sides and backing the woman of the people. She could win, if for no other reason than her ethics. 

As the social conditions continue to rot out from under us, we realize that what many call “Our Democracy” is merely cant and ritual. Many can say that because they have a vote. But a vote (for the white elite in this society) is simply a procedure, an instrumentality designed to include us in a process from which we have already been excluded. But People of Color still have to struggle to have a vote. For them, it becomes a sign of official inclusion. For those who were born included, however, the vote only gets them the alleged right to choose which of those already chosen by Party leaderships as their next leader. . 

We seriously hope that the mayor’s opponent beats the living daylights out of the mayor when the votes are cast. He has shown himself, through his corruption, to be both anti-democratic and authoritarian. His defeat will not provide us with democracy; that is not on the ballot. But it will give us a voice that listens to the people, the way the corrupt authoritarians won’t.