The angry cries of “dirty politics!” do cause me to laugh a bit. Dirty politics is where people get killed, my friends. In Culver City, dirty politics is where feelings get hurt. When you care passionately about something, and someone else argues against your position, feelings can hurt. Still, allow me a gentle reminder that the opposite of love is not hate; it’s apathy. The thousands of folks who vote regularly in this city are such a small slice of the population that we constitute an aristocracy of energy. As the famous Lorax of Dr. Seuss told us. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” I know you care, because you keep asking me for my opinions. So, here’s what I think we should do.

As I have already lauded Andy Weissman, I don’t have much to add to his endorsement. I’ve seen Andy vote on hundreds of agenda items, and I find his politics to be centered and sane. To those who object to Andy for any particular decision he has made, I feel that the good he has done far outweighs any error. I also feel he is one of the two assured winners in this race.

Meghan is, as many have said, a needed addition to the council. To those in the uncertain category who doubt her lack of experience, that standard would doom us to an unending line  of incumbents. She is  passionate about politics; her philosophy is how she lives her life. This is not a part-time job to Sahli-Wells. This is how you change the future. My only whisper of warning to Meghan is not to play her hand too harshly. Richard Nixon would have easily won the presidency in 1972, but his ego needed a landslide; hence, Watergate. To use a metaphor closer her Culver City heart – don’t pedal on the downhill, my dear. Gravity will get you there.

The arguments with the most heat have all been about Scott Malsin. He is one of our leaders who seems to be such a controversial figure, voters really do love him or hate him. I don’t sit on either side of that fence. Scott has done very well on the council, and I agree with many of the votes he has cast. I think he suffers somewhat from Al Gore Syndrome. His official persona as council is often seen as disconnected and dry. In real life, he can be very relaxed and easy to communicate with, and even occasionally funny. Endorsing Scott is not simple, but it’s worthwhile. Like Meghan, he is committed to both arts funding and local animal control. His work on the Expo Line has been important. I want to see him finish his term. But this is going to be a very close race, and someone else maybe finishing his term.

I am really a fence sitter on the last vote. Neither O’Leary or Clarke has me so impressed or so unimpressed that I want to endorse one. O’Leary has done a decent job in office, but not an outstanding one. I don’t discredit him for his business or his injury ( hey, my people are Irish, they’ve just been here longer – I do know how these things happen ) but his lack of a deeper understanding on the long-term effects of some of his votes. He often uses language that seems to say the opposite of what he means.  Maddeningly, I have often found Mehaul doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Still, it’s the right thing. And as I am (ethnically) Irish, it is a political sin to cast an incomplete ballot. The ghost of my grandmother will not let me sleep, and as any Irish can tell you, those Callahans are relentless.

Which brings me to consider Jim Clarke. Clarke is in the strange position of being an old political hand who is a newcomer to the scene.  When he declared his long membership in the Culver City Democratic Club, I knew he had their endorsement; truly, the rest of the evening was kind of a creative time- waster. His resume with Diane Watson and  Antonio Villargosa shows me a person committed to politics. Unlike Meghan, he seems to have been someone to put it away at the end of the day, or I feel that we would have seen a whole lot more of him around here. We will do better with a balance of new and old, and Clarke is a fresh ingredient that might add some leavening. If he can raise the dough, he will be a good addition to the council.

The Tax- Vote yes. No harm in it, we need it, just vote yes.

I do not care to sneer, smear or disdain those I disagree with; I would rather make you think or feel or laugh.  I do think the “stealing the lawn signs” bit is so 8th grade, it needs to stop for the sake of dignity. Trying to make the opposition invisible means they can make you invisible too.

I have published every letter I have received in this election, and I hope all our readers recognize that Crossroads is here to be a forum for everyone in Culver City. You might not agree with my choices, just make a choice. If I can persuade you to get to the polls and vote, then I have succeeded. There is no limit on the energy of commitment. If we get a record breaking turnout on Tuesday, it will still be only a small slice of the people who are are affected by what happens in the Mike Balkman Council Chambers.

Go vote. Check on your neighbors and make sure they can get to the polls. If you already mailed it in, good for you. I’ll see you at the party, with the rest of the aristocracy.

The difficult fact of the matter is that you cannot serve in elected office in Culver City if you are not self-employed and/or independently wealthy. There are a few exceptions, but you’d better have the work ethic of a New England Puritan and the stamina of an Olympic athlete if you are putting in 40 hours a week on someone else’s time clock and still making sure you cover your end of city council affairs. Just look at the council members who have served over the last two decades. Not much middle management in those chairs, primarily because we don’t pay you to do it. I’ve listened to a number of ex-councilmembers complain and boast in the same breath about how much money they “lost” by spending their time in office.

When the 1974 council voted to give themselves the same benefits as the upper management in the city, there was no huge outcry in opposition.  Possibly because some kind of guilt from the citizens felt they should give the council something for their time and effort, or perhaps because it was done in an era where there was no national crisis over who gets health insurance and why. Now that the last downshift on the gears has cooled the council to the benefits only during the term served, there’s really nothing left to debate.

Yet the conversation continues.

I can admit that I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is easier, but not always better. When I was younger, I turned down a job promotion because it would have meant giving up my mornings walking the beach and my Wednesday night poetry workshop, for a sum that would not have made much of a difference. It was not about money, it was about the quality of my life. I wasn’t rich, but I counted myself as happy. Still, when I had to wait for my tax refund to get dental work done or borrow money to fix my car, I wondered if I’d made the right choice.

When I was very young, I once lived in a house with 15 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms and it’s own private lake. Interestingly, it was not any fun at all. My family was so scorned for our money and so isolated from the people around us we might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. When people decide you are wrong (or evil) just because you have money and they don’t, the conversation stops.

The other funny thing about the rich/poor notion is that people who long for wealth frequently despise the people that they think have it. Why be so angry and so disgusted with someone whose shoes you would want to step into? Would you really trade places, knowing that you are going to be so reviled ?

While I am passionate about the Occupy movement, and the need to make it possible for the citizens of our country to overthrow the corporate oligarchy, I’m not against wealth or those who hold it. They have the power to use their talents for the common good, because they can afford to do so; they do not have to spent their days making the rent. So, why not put them to work for us?

I was listening to an interview with Richard Branson, the creator of Virgin Records, Virgin Airways and dozens of other Virgin companies where he addressed the idea of creativity and social responsibility. “It’s great fun to solve ugly problems.” When you have a few billion dollars in assets, spending your time funding antiretroviral drugs for pregnant woman at risk of passing H.I.V. to their children is a very good thing to do with your time.

If you only have a couple million dollars, you could spend your time in meetings about public transportation, and green space, and parking, trying to make the place you live better for everyone who lives there. That could be a good thing to do with your time.

So, to paraphrase Sophie Tucker, I’ve been gainfully employed, and I’ve been gainfully unemployed. Sometimes, you take on a project that you know is not ever going to compensate you in dollars. But when your talents and your concerns move things in a better direction, everyone is better off. Whatever you get for that, it’s worth it.

When Andy Weissman brought up the notion that the city council should forgo retirement health benefits, Jeff Cooper chided him for making a political move. Andy Weissman does not do anything – from making a motion on the dais to choosing a tie- which is not political move.

Nor do you.

Every time you open your wallet, you vote. You vote with your feet, you vote with your eyes, and you vote with (of course) your opinions. If you want this little city to be the place that you envision, you have to accept responsibility for how you cast your vote.

As Jerry Chabola accepted the “local hero” title from the Rotary, he told a story about a fellow coach who suddenly had to deal with a fatal diagnosis. As despair moved towards acceptance, he said to Jerry that before he died, he just wanted to be able to walk across the new athletic field. In complete sincerity, Jerry offered from the stage, “I don’t know if we can make that happen.”  A voice from the audience called out “Yes we can!”

Politics is how we make the decisions that affect out lives, and yes, frame our deaths.  To imagine otherwise to stay in the locked room where ignorance is bliss.

You are currently engaged in the political act of reading. Choosing to access local news on line instead of via a sheet of newsprint is a political choice. If you choose corporate news, or tabloid news online, just the same – it is a vote for how you want the world to be. It’s a vote for who you support, who speaks for you. If you choose to read only political propaganda, and consider that to be news, you are not alone. Millions of Americans opt to ignore the facts every hour of every day in order to keep company with those whose opinions they already know they will agree with. It puts you in the soft, comfortable place of not having to think much because everyone else – well, everyone you know- feels the same way.

Every choice you make has repercussions, and if you think about what those echoes will be, then you are making an informed choice. You gotta walk your talk, or your talk is worthless. Worse, it is counter to what you truly support.

As Dorothy Parker said, “I don’t have to attend every argument I’m invited to.” I choose not to spend my energy getting into a bickering contest over the details. Responding to a response is a strategy so diluted, it’s tasteless. But as Moe Stavenezer once said to me (many years ago)  at a Venice Beachhead meeting “You’re getting hate mail ! That’s fantastic! It means you have readers who really, really care what you have to say!”

My choice to write for this community is my vote for keeping ethics and commitment in the center. I could spend just as much time writing fiction or poetry, and then I wouldn’t even have to sit through all those meetings – and I could probably be just as well paid for my efforts. I continue to write because of all the people who read me, and thank me writing, every day.

It is has not gone unnoticed that while our corporate news has an ad from B of A, I have a post about how B of A is abusing a local mortgage holder. That’s how I vote.

Our high school does not need a new athletic field to grant the wish of a dying man. We need one to meet the needs of the tens of thousands of student athletes who will use it. If we can do it in time to make someone’s death more satisfying, even better. No, it’s not a vote against the arts or refurbishing the Frost. We have to know that we have the resources to take care of all of it. Politics “the art of the possible.”

How we choose is how we make it possible.

Andy Weissman is such a good politician, I wish I could vote him into an even higher office – maybe the Senate. Truly, I would like to see Andy sitting on the Supreme Court. When I look at every committee, board and volunteer effort he has made over the last few decades, I know this is someone who understands the politics of politics. I will be delighted to see him re-elected to the city council.

If we paid Jerry Chabola for every off-the-clock hour he has put in taking care of our high school students (and Janet, for that matter,) and he had put all that into an escrow account for the athletic field,  we could have every blade of grass replaced by an agricultural landscaper with a master’s degree in feng shui. Jerry is not even a politician, but he knows how the game is played.

Like Andy, there is nothing cynical in it. They live here. So do you.

About those cookies; to me, they are an annual source of irritation, extra work and unneeded sugar. But my girls are scouts because it’s part of my politics.

When I was working in professional politics- at NOW, at LACAAW, at Heal the Bay, I noticed that about 9 out 10 women I met in these organizations were former Girl Scouts. When you are a Girl Scout, you learn to work with a group, to speak in public, and to make plans and follow through. You learn to raise money (cookies) and to budget for projects and expenses. You learn about community service and individual accomplishment. As part of a troop, you can recognize that what you do has an effect on those around you.

Just like living in a city.

It’s not just that it’s election season. You get to vote every day.

Don’t do it.

I see you out there on the ledge, contemplating political suicide. Don’t.

It’s been a rough stretch of road, but I kinda figured that you knew it was going to be difficult.  I realized last Tuesday night that you have never been on the other side of such an angry audience before, and I felt I needed to say something to you.

Believe me, I have tremendous compassion for the outrageous position you’ve put yourself in. I did a lot of stupid things when I was your age, (most of them involving high times and lo mein)  but I did not do them as an elected official. If you want this to be your first elected office and not your last, you need to reconsider the stand you are taking, and who you think you are doing this for, and why.

So, even though your face tightens into a rictus of forced politesse every time you see me walk into a room, you should read this and take it to heart.

You are a smart guy. Anyone who has the education that you have has the brains to figure out the situation. You created this situation. By opting to look only at the rules and not at the reality, you are working with theory and not with practice.

What you need to do is look beyond this situation. This is not about unionizing the adjuncts. This is about recognizing who put you in office, and understanding that you work for them. If you don’t do what they think is the right thing, you will be removed.

Those 30-plus people who spoke at the podium during the last school board meeting all vote. They will not wait for the next election cycle, they will get very busy organizing a recall. And, as stated from the podium, a lawsuit.

Your reflections that your childhood experience in these schools gives you the ideal perspective to decide what these schools need falls far short of reality. Your affection for the adjuncts who served in your classroom does not give you the right to take away the ability of non-profit organization to provide other adjuncts for other classrooms. (It pains me that the non-logic in that previous sentence is a reflection of reality- crazy talk, that is.) Your desire to hand over the rights of parents to fund-raise to union officials only ensures that there will be huge fundraisers to end your position and your entire political career.

The people who spoke for hours last Tuesday night are only a small sample of the thousands of angry parents who will be needing your head on a platter if you continue to support the extreme overreach of the ACE union. If you continue on this course, you will assure your place in local history as one of absolute infamy. Any idea of any elected office after this – in Culver City or anywhere else- will be about as likely as a position playing center for the Lakers.

The idea of union protection for these positions is not, of itself, bad. The reality of it is terrible. So, please stop theorizing. Wake up and smell the traffic on the street below you.

If you continue to give merit to this absurd power grab on the part of the union, your future is over yesterday. You are here to serve the people of Culver City, and the parents of the district. You are not here to give the union leaders an easier job. If you would rather serve on a union board, by all means, go ahead. Right now, you are the president of the school board, and you need to start acting like one.

Unless you have some secret longing to be forced out of Culver City, to leave this place far behind and start a fresh new life all on your own, you need to get this off your desk.

You are young. People forget that, because you present yourself as someone who could be a decade or two older than you are. Age does not always confer wisdom, but youth never does. As we say in my profession, you have to stand up and live before you sit down and write. Take this in as a great educational experience, and remember what it is you want in the long run.

So, please listen to the thousands of people who can vote you in or out, and not the dozen people who have talked you out on to this ledge.

You can come back inside. There’s still time.

Don’t jump.

It is no surprise to me (or to Ari Noonan, for that matter) that the job of editing the Culver City News under the auspices of Community Media Corp. is not simply a thankless task, but an impossible one. Just kvetching about how badly you have been treated is not newsworthy. Everyone who left that desk left at least bruised or at worst broken. That’s not news.

The Community Media Corp. publishes a second paper out of the office of the News entitled Blue Pacific that is supposed to be distributed in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. And it’s not. That is news.

During my time as editor at the News and Pacific, Pacific did in fact get printed and distributed. I used it fairly often to run calendar notes and the occasional ad for events at the Unitarian Church in Santa Monica where I am a member. I can recall several occasions when I asked a friend from the congregation to pick up “Blue Pacific” at one of the distribution points listed and met with success.

Synchronistically, one of those was when noted Los Angeles Times journalist Tim Rutten was the speaker for a lecture at the church. His topic of how crucial journalism- real ethical journalism- is to the health and success of our culture influenced me deeply.

Of course, I had to check out Scott’s claim, and a trip to Santa Monica on the day the paper was scheduled to be distributed proved that it was not at the places I knew it should have been. No, I did not check all of them- I sampled. The people I asked at these locations about Blue Pacific had never seen it. I felt I had sufficient evidence to run Scott’s piece.

It’s one thing to abuse your employees; it’s another to abuse your advertisers. Like many kinds of bullying and abuse, the perpetrator can be led think “I got away with that; what else can I get away with ?”

The logic that allows newspapers to say – we print 40,000 copies; therefore we have at least 40,000 readers – is too weak to stand. When you claim to print a certain number of papers and you don’t – how long will your advertisers think that they are getting what they are paying for ?

The Culver City News is, as everyone who cares has realized by now, only very occasionally interested in the audience it purports to serve. The abuse that they are committing is not only on their employees and their advertisers, but on the entire community.

It’s a shame, because as the oldest paper in town, it should be a jewel – but with a budget that wouldn’t buy lunch at LUNCH, (or George’s Coffee Shop for that matter-) and a stack of responsibilities so tall it blocks out the sky, the editor is just the punching bag for why it doesn’t work. It’s planned to not work.

With Bridges so enthusiastically flipping the bird as his exit strategy, he has deprived himself of the chance of a second act. But he didn’t want one. There are times in life when not only should you burn your bridges, but dynamite any access roads as well. Before the next victim is selected from the infamous ad on Craig’s List, it is time to boycott the News.

I’m talking about tossing the bathwater here, not the baby. With all sincere respect to Mike Cohen and Julie Lugo Cerra, both of whom are very good writers, their continued participation is the only thing making this scam look legit. They are both terrific contributors who never miss a deadline and never get a check. They do this because they enjoy the information they offer and they know you’ll enjoy it too. No disrespect is intended to the other writers who grace the pages, but most of it could run anywhere. It is not, so to speak, Culver-centric stuff. Good copy is good copy in any format, but a local paper should be local.

It’s time for the Culver City community to deprive Community Media of their ability to abuse us. Just pick it up off the driveway, and toss it into the blue recycling bin. Or, even better, put in the compost (sans rubber band, of course.) and allow it to decompose into something useful – mulch.

First, the back story, which has been on a slow simmer for years. The Classified Employees Union is threatening to sue over volunteers in the classroom, and adjuncts who are not employees of the school district. From the union  perspective, these are all jobs that should come under union jurisdiction. Since these employees are paid for by parent fundraising, they are not under union protection. To make them employees of the district is so impossibly expensive, we will have to fire them all.

The crisp reality of this is that we will lose all of our support staff in the classrooms, and people who have been employed under these terms will be unemployed.

The district is squeezed so tight that they cannot hire anyone else. The parents are giving their all, all the time. Every bake sale, every e-scrip drive, every hour put in weeding a garden or driving to a field trip is time spent not earning money. That’s in addition to all the financial donations that we make every month.

Why is this coming up now? Because the union thinks they have the votes on the school board to get it through. It does not matter how destructive, how disruptive or how utterly anti-logical it is. It’s a power grab.

While it might surprise some people to find me quoting the New Testament, I cannot think of another example more apt. When the Pharisees are giving Jesus are bad time about breaking the sabbath – he should not be working- he asks (general paraphrase here) “Are we suppossed to live for the rules, or are the rules here to support us ?”( It’s Mark Chapter 2 verse 27 if you want to look it up.)

Has any of these parent volunteers or adjuncts asked for the union to represent them ? Do any of these people feel that they are being exploited or abused because they do not have union protection ? The union seems to be playing the part of the Pharisees.

The oft-reapted mantra that “It’s all about the students” does not even qualify to be in the room. This is just a nonsensical move on the part of the union. It is absolutely going to harm the students. Absolutely.

Why now, when we are looking at the potential loss of another million or so out of the next budget ? Because they think they have the votes on the school board to get their way.

Stepping over to one of my other favorite texts, The Bhagavad-Gita, there is some complimentary wisdom. If your are not familiar with the Gita, it ‘s the story of a man trying to decide to go into battle. A fast paraphrase of the first chapter, Arjuna’s Dejection; “What good does it do us to make war on our brothers? How can we know happiness when we kill our own kin? ”

Gutting our classrooms of all the help we work so hard to provide is like going to war against your family. Deciding that rules are more important than reality is orthodox insanity.

This absurd idea that we need to keep fighting each other like the Capulets and the Montagues over every minor detail takes up energy. That’s energy we could be using to educate our children. And y’know, making the world a better place.

It would be great if every job could have union protection. Some other time, I’ll clue you in on the international wages-for-housework campaign. We all deserve sick time and medical benefits and vacations. But restricting parent involvement in CCUSD is not going to bring that about any faster. It’s a step in the wrong direction.

Editor’s Note- The link for the district is on the lower right side box. The link for the parents group is in the editor letter directly below. Comments will post – add in below this text. The email address “editor@culvercitycrossroads.com” is not functional right now- please send to jmsxroads@gmail.com. See you at the meeting. 

As someone who has been female my entire life, I have to say it’s good to see the light shining. With the news of Karen Handel’s resignation, the light gets even brighter. We do not need charities that allegedly support women’s health working against women’s rights. Whatever self-serving insanity has been going on behind all those pink ribbons, the supply lines have been cut.

I recall a moment several years ago when I walked into my local Pavilions, and was visually arrested by the amount of pink everywhere. There were pink ribbons on the yogurt, on the cereal, on the coffee; I think they were on every product in the store with the exception of apples and onions. As someone who has worked for many a non-profit organization, I knew that any non-profit that can pull off that kind of marketing certainly doesn’t need my petite donation. In fact, any non-profit with that kind of marketing arm isn’t working on their cause. They are working on their marketing. I wrote Komen off that very day.

At one of the non-profit organizations I worked for back in the 20th Century, and at one of the initial board meetings, someone asked what the organization’s strategy was. The answer was quick. “We want to solve the problem; we want to put ourselves out of business!” The response was even faster. “Well, now, hold on just a minute, I don’t think that’s the best strategy to start out a campaign.”

There is the deadly truth of the good cause. As soon as you decide your mission is to solve a problem, that problem becomes your bread and butter, your raison d’etre, your motto and your flag. Solve it, and you are redundant.

With their unassailable fundraising ability, flying their pink ribbons, Susan G.Komen long ago entered into an arraigned marriage with Big Pharma and the cancer industry. They are not looking for a “cure.” They are looking for more drugs to sell you. Really expensive drugs.

As for Planned Parenthood, I will tell you the tale of how they saved me.

When I was a young woman living in Venice, I felt ill. Really ill. It just wouldn’t go away, and I kept feeling worse. I could barely get out of bed in the morning. During my lunch hour, I sat in my car and slept. My friends were concerned that I was so out of it; I was just exhausted all the time. My girlfriend Laura finally offered “Hey, Jude, you know, you might be pregnant.”

I assured her this was simply not possible. I had been give a rock-solid diagnosis of infertility several years before, when coming off of birth control pills had left me with bizarre symptoms and apparently no hope of ever having kids. Besides which, my boyfriend was in Berkeley at grad school, and I had not even seen him in months. Maybe three months.

Eyebrows were raised. “Stranger things have happened. Go find out.”

Sick with fear, I went to Planned Parenthood.

I still remember walking in the door, feeling embarrassingly young and so very tired. I just wanted to lie down. I filled in the forms, I answered the questions, and I let them take some blood for a test. I sat and I waited. I thought of every possibility while I sat and I waited, although I was so tired that even thinking was a heroic effort. It seemed it was either pregnancy or death, neither of which seemed at all appealing.  When the charming young man in the white lab coat came back in the room, he was smiling. “Ok, we have it figured out.”

I looked at him waiting for him to pronounce my future.

“You are not pregnant.” Oh good, I thought, oh dammit, oh well, I guess that other doctor was right. I’ll just never have kids.

“But you have so few red blood cells, I seriously don’t know how you walked in here on your own strength. You’re the most anemic person I have ever seen.” He gave me a bottle of iron pills, and asked if I was getting a balanced diet. He assured me I was not going to die, at least not from anemia, any time soon. I lay down on the examining table, and I cried with relief.

Hours later, I was so totally revived I was incredulous. I felt so much better it was unbelievable.  Planned Parenthood’s service had nothing to do with anything even as controversial as a condom, and it made a huge difference for me.

For all the corporate funding pouring into Komen breast cancer is becoming more and more common, while survival rates aren’t going down—unless you include the extra years of life accounted for by earlier detection. Which would be a a credit to, y’know – Planned Parenthood.

Komen’s research focuses almost exclusively on bringing women into treatment as early as possible and finding more drugs that Big Pharma can profit from. This is a money maker for all of them. Why would they want to cure breast cancer? You can’t be putting yourself out of business. That’s no way to run a campaign.

Planned Parenthood will be around a long as parenthood needs planning. They are offering easy access to very simple health care that anyone can benefit from. Against abortion ? Don’t have one. But don’t force people without resources to risk STD’s, pregnancy or cancer (or anemia) because we are the only developed country in the world without health care for all. Planned Parenthood deserves every drop of funding it can get.

Bringing it all the way home- support the Youth Health Center at CCHS. The best way to cure any health problem is with prevention and education.

As someone who feels uniquely qualified to comment, let me just say that the “Journalist Wanted ” ad does not rate as good journalism, although it is a good ad. It’s an attempt to persuade you of something that is only partly true.

It is not a job. It is a number of jobs crushed into one desk. You are expected to be an editor, a reporter, a proofreader, a volunteer recruiter, a fact checker, a copy editor, a graphic designer and a diplomat. That’s 8 jobs – oops, sorry, eight jobs, because you also have to write in AP Stylebook. So that’s nine. Oh, AND you ‘re also the editor of the CC News website. Which I’m sure is not just another job added on, but another half a dozen.

The folks who run the News seem to be unable to understand that this is not a job that one person can do – at least, not for any length of time, or without going insane.
Not only is the editor expected to do nine jobs, they get less than a third of a paycheck. Why the owners of Community Media expect to get someone whose skill set can cover all of those requirements for a salary you could earn selling shoes or flipping burgers makes no sense.
The candidate will need to have a supportive spouse, or trust fund, because the money they pay at the News won’t buy lunch. It certainly won’t allow you to pay rent anywhere that you could live in Culver City. Realistically, you need a trust fund, because you will be working 70 or 80 hours a week, and your spouse may get resentful over the fact that they never see you. They might even decide that you are having an affair, because it’s just not believeable that anyone should be expected to put in a 70 hour workweek for that kind of chump change.

So, I offer a round of applause to Scott Bridges for hanging in with it as long as he did. While Gary Kohatsu is the interim editor, the paper is in very capable (but already seriously overworked)  hands. Kohatsu is the editor of the Gardena paper for Community Media, and adding the News and Blue Pacific to his to-do list is just obnoxious. I hope Kohatsu is getting combat pay for this, but I doubt it. The fact that the op-ed piece last week came in from Michigan is a good clue as to how much Culver City news you’ll be seeing in the Culver City News for the duration. Another added highlight is that they will be going into the election cycle with an empty desk, so they will be looking to hire someone in a hurry.

To speculate as to who the next ‘Professor of the Dark Arts’ will be, or to get even more honest, the new drummer for Spinal Tap; it will be someone willing to try, who has about half of the requirements for the desk, who does not live in or know anything about Culver City, and who will quit just as soon as they can find another job.

After I had been fired at the CC News, I ran into Ari Noonan at a school board meeting. He said, “I understand you have joined the ranks of former editors of the Culver City News.” I admitted I had. He smiled at me and said “My dear, there are more of us than there are former Mayors.”

While Ari is not famed for his accuracy, the sentiment was sincere. If that wasn’t statistically true in 2009, we are catching up fast.

That this post went viral should not have surprised me as much as it did. It was a well written, first-person essay about being in an historic situation. When I published “Just a Thought – Parade Dress” in September, I just had a feeling that Occupy was going to be more than a blip on the radar.  I feel that its vital to walk your talk. If you believe in something, you live it.

We began to notice Monday that the server was getting swamped. The site was almost impossible to access for any length of time all week – we kept crashing. When the numbers started to come in, it was jaw-dropping. More than 9,000 visits on Monday. By mid- week it was more than 40,000. Comments went on and on.  There are still more than a hundred comments in the queue, but I’m undecided about publishing more.

Where Patrick and I were equally dismayed was that so many commented on Occupy – the legal details of camping on public property, getting arrested as civil disobedience, and enduring mistreatment at the hands of the LAPD.  Not many picked up the second part of the piece about WHY all this is happening in the first place.

Pulling a quote from Paul Simon’s American Tune “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered- I don’t have a friend who feels at ease – I don’t have a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to it’s knees.” Here in my small slice of America, I’m surrounded by people who have lost all the money they worked for decades to save. I can’t count the folks I know who are laid-off, working part-time, temping, scraping through.  There is a thick demographic layer of grown children, back home with their college degrees, and no hope of finding a job; not a job in the field they trained for, just any job at all. I know someone who is dealing with the terrifying possibility of being homeless. While all these problems need to be resolved, the system must change or we are just treating the symptoms and not the disease.

As I was walking up Braddock Drive last night,  singing Christmas Carols with my Girl Scouts, I passed a yard that has a tent and a banner up on the fence. “We are the 99% -  Support Occupy.” While the tent seemed uninhabited, it was a potent symbol. The girls did not need an explanation. They were all hip to the movement. Had anyone been living in the tent, we would have serenaded them with “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer.”

The hits on the site are proof to me that we are all in this. I can’t quite say we are all in this together. My mail was running about 20:1 that Patrick was a hero for standing up for his beliefs and telling the truth, versus the few who though he was a fool or being there in the first place.  The portion of commentators who reviled Patrick for his actions seemed to feel that anyone making an attempt at making the world a better place was an idiot. (I do publish people I disagree with- yep, I do.)

Patrick offered “I’m kinda eager to get back to my regular routine of writing fart jokes, being a husband and dad, and being a UU.  Yes, the past week has been gratifying and humbling and the response from all over has been beyond-unforgettable for me – (20,000 pageviews just from the UK, alone!  10,000 pageviews from Germany!).  At the same time, it’s been a bit overwhelming, and has kinda crowded out the brainspace that I would otherwise devote to my work and my life.”

He added, “I’m sure that I’ll always, in various ways, support the Occupy movement (in whatever form it evolves into), but I don’t want to become its public spokesperson, and I don’t want it to claim a disproportionate chunk of who I am as a person.”

So, as we get into Monday, life will go on, the holidays will arrive, and I hope that we all find more ways to support each other through all the changes we have to face. Occupy your life.

I’m waiting for ( hoped-for)  pictures from Seattle and Portland today as we Occupy the Ports, and I’ve just gotten word that Terminal 5 in Portland is closed by the strikers.

Feel free to forward the link.

It’s going to be a very close race, and while the top three candidates have each put out their best, the bottom two have offered only mistrust, suspicion, and the repetition of misinformation. They are only there to stir up mud. The fact that it’s the very same mud we were given two years ago ought to make it boring, but instead I am filled with awe. Bottom feeders can be remarkable specimens.

Gary Abrams astounds me. While it was reported in the Culver City News that he came in seventh in a field of seven in the last school board race, the fact is that he came in seventh in a field of six; Roger Maxwell had dropped out of the race after his name could be taken off the ballot, and Maxwell got more votes that Abrams did.

Abrams pointed this out at the PTA/LWV forum, when he offered that he “wanted to meet Mr. Rodgers, that guy who beat me in the last election.” He could not even be bothered to learn his opponent’s actual name. At that same forum, Abrams confessed that he could not read the district budget, and then proclaimed it to be full of lies. If you can’t read it, how do you know? It could be full of erotic Lebanese poetry or recipes for a savory pie crust. To say that you don’t understand something and then condemn it is simply to offer your own ignorance.

At the Ask2Know Kids Forum, Abrams completely stunned me by saying that the historical choice for a speaker for the students would be Malcom X. No one could be a bigger example of everything that Abrams is not. I am a huge fan of Malcom in part because he was a man who realized he was ignorant, and he educated himself. All of his success as a speaker and a public figure was because of the time he spent readying and studying. He could have spent his jail time as a hustler instead of an auto-didactic; rather than spend time, he invested it.  Self-education transformed him from a frustrated crook into a cultural leader. We are all the richer for his choice.

So I would ask the Mr. Abrams spend the next two years – if he is planning to run for office again – studying. Learn to read a budget, learn the correct names of the other people in the race, and have something more to offer other than the suspicion that the people in office are not doing what you think they should do.

Or please just sit the next one out.

The other bottom feeder- Robert Zirgulis, seems to be someone who simply refuses to learn. Using the same tactics he has used to lose both the last school board race and the last city council race, Zirgulis is all about smear tactics, finger pointing and catching a ride on someone else’s complaints. His inexplicable love of oil companies hit a new gusher on this round trying to discredit the current school board for not taking an offer from Chevron to put up solar panels, without ever broadcasting the fact that deal would have brought profits only to Chevron, and not to CCUSD. Every major point in Zirgulis’ platform is based on a similar omission.

At the PTA/LWV forum, Zirgulis once again brought up his family’s suffering at the hands of the Third Reich, as he has in every election cycle, but then couldn’t find a reason to support teaching children about sexual orientation and discrimination. Doesn’t prejudice kill people? Does teaching diversity somehow mean we should be tolerant of some kinds of prejudice? That doesn’t fit any logical formula I know.

The great shaming of lawyers in this race brings to mind the famous Shakespeare quote “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” (That’s from Henry VI, Act IV, Scene II- there’s my auto-didactic extra credit for the day. Will Power, baby!) It was such a popular joke a few years ago it wasn’t hard to find someone wearing it on a t-shirt. What most don’t realize is that the character who speaks those words (whose name really is Dick) is a bottom-feeder, a petty thief turned politician, looking to find more ways to get himself dishonestly ahead.

It’s going to be a very close race for the top three. They have great credentials, huge community support, and lots to offer. The nail biter may come down to how many votes are wasted on Abrams and Zirgulis, neither of whom is in any way prepared to work on a team, to create policy or to address the needs of the students.

As I have published previously about all three front runners, I don’t need to add any of that in here. Every concerned voter in Culver City already has their ballot marked- probably many have already mailed them in.

In favor of Mr. Abrams and Mr. Zirgulis, I do have to say that anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort to run for office has enough candlepower to shed some light on something. So, go find a volunteer slot somewhere (Mr. Abrams, I know you have won awards for this – keep on keepin’ on- ) and offer your energy to make a difference in the world. Come up from the mud into the next level of evolution and put your efforts into something that will be helpful. You may find yourself filled, not just with a feeling of connection and accomplishment, but a sense of peace.