A Tree Grows in Santa Ana

Just when you thought no one cared about the voices of children, seniors or low-income families, California's parks department offers a glimmer of hope.

The state agency has awarded Latino Health Access -- which organized hundreds of residents to lobby city officials for more some green space -- a grant of $3.5 million to build the only park and community center in the 92701 zip code of Santa Ana.

Until now, kids in Santa Ana have often made make-shift playgrounds around back-alley Dumpsters.

The park and community center represent the collective action of public agencies and engaged residents to open safe, green spaces in Santa Ana, said Ana Carrichi, policy director for the organization.

State bureaucrats said they found the participation of children an "especially heartwarming" aspect of the Latino Health Access pitch for more green space.

Ruth Colement, director of California State Parks said her agency received 475 pitches from community groups vying for 62 grants. The outpouring, she added, "clearly shows the extent of recreation needs throughout California."

Can You Fix It? The U.S. Budget, That Is.

If you could close the government's budget gaps, how would you do it?

For once, you can actually try. The New York Times has created an interactive tool that lets you choose what you would like to chop off the American budget. Your choices would help save the American people from projected shortfalls of $418 billion (in 2015) and $1,345 billion (in 2030). All you have to do is choose what to cut. Will you decrease war troops? Increase the age for social security? Tax millionaires? Tax carbon? Just check the box next to the initiative and watch the New York Times’ graph fulfill the budget gaps.

Sounds easy, right?

Link to budget puzzle:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?hp

"The impossible will take a little while"

"The difficult I'll do right now..
The impossible will take a little while. . ."
from Crazy He Calls Me,
by Carl Sigman and Bob Russell

Candidates' Forum, McAllen

We began on a hot day in May, talking and planning an area-wide effort to get out the vote. The goals were clear; the task daunting. We would choose ten precincts in the area which had high-voter registration, but low voter turnout. And they would be places where poor families lived. In the last midterm elections (2006), only 17.5 per cent of registered voters participated in the election: half of what happened in the rest of the state.

"We" were the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, a group of community-based organizations located in this corner of the US/Mexico border.

Over the years, I have heard no end of reasons for the low turnout here along the border, everything from ”poor people don’t vote; they aren’t stupid, you know” to “people from Mexico don’t trust the voting process, because it was so corrupt over there.”

I have also heard, over and again, that the Rio Grande Valley is a sleeping giant, and, that if it ever woke up, Texas’ state politics would be turned on its head.

Impossible, that.

Our goals

So we began with the difficult: finding volunteers to go door to door, not once or twice, but three times or more. And other volunteers to make phone calls. And yet others to track down those who could vote and those who would vote, to creating reams of paper so that we could track folks over time. This was not a one time project. We decided, as a group, as the Equal Voice Network, to adopt these ten precincts for a long time.

And increase turnout, in this election, by at least 10 per cent.

Which, in May, when we began this project, seemed like a lot. It would be harder than ever to find reasons for people to vote--the 2008 elections had a huge turn out from the Latino community. People were voting for hope, then, and there was tremendous energy.

But by October of 2010, the Obama administration had deported nearly 500,000 people. While some claimed that these were “criminal aliens”, it turns out that they are mostly not.

In any case, each deported person is someone’s brother or cousin or uncle.

There was “increased security at the border” but there was no immigration reform. “Immigration reform” was the very first request of the 25,000 families in our network.

So, we began with the difficult. And we preached the importance of standing up and being counted. Of speaking, so as to be heard. “Mi voto es mi voz.” And of knocking on doors, and knocking on more doors.

Early voting began on this past Monday. By Wednesday, papers statewide were reporting an astonishment--voting in the Valley was up over 200%. Two hundred per cent more people were voting this year.

We were stunned, we were excited, but mostly we kept on working. There is still another couple of weeks to go.

Perhaps this turnout is driven by some heated local races; perhaps it is up because of angry voters. I of course like to think that it is up because people were responding to someone asking them to give a damn, and to vote.

In the meantime, the large old grandfather clock in charge of marking out history tick-tocks once more towards the moment when the impossible becomes real, something that should happen in just a little while.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

Equal Voice in the Valley

Saturday dawned with a glorious cool, crisp bit of weather that is rare in these tropical parts. Across the Valley, men and women who normally spend their precious Saturday mornings at the market, or repairing the house, or setting straight the things that got of order during the work week, head out the door with a bounce in their step and purpose in their eyes.

It is the “Equal Voice Campaign’s Get Out the Vote” Saturday in the Rio Grande Valley. A thousand strong, at least (I have lost count, for the moment) slip on bright, gold tee-shirts that proclaim “Your Vote is Your Voice”, and head out the door to do some civic engagement.

In Brownsville, the voting promoters gather at a local community center, pick up packets with addresses for door to be knocked on, and head off into the streets. There are smiles all around; the get out the vote campaign in this neighborhood has always been a great success. Those who promote the vote are received with anticipation. In fact the challenge here is to be able to get around to all of the houses on your list--each person that you run into wants to talk politics. There is no voter apathy in this community.

In San Benito, the Get Out the Voters invade the local, and popular, community days celebration, passing out voting commitment cards and encouraging attendance at the candidates’ forum for later on the morning. I worry that people would be more interested in the antique car show or the karate demonstrations, but they fill a small auditorium to listen to the candidates for local offices make their pitches.

Ron Rogers, one of the local activists, tells me that he thinks that with this effort, “We might really be able to control some of the decisions made in this town. Wouldn’t that be something,” he says, “Working families dictating policy.”

In McAllen, some three hundred people pack a meeting room where forty politicians have lined up to learn what the community expects from them. The politicians are not allowed to preach, they are given thirty seconds to respond to questions that the community of poor families have come up with . “What will you do to better school bus service to our rural communities?” “How do you plan to keep school yards open after hours, so kids have a place to play?” If the politician goes on for too long, she is given a small American flag. This seems to be as effective on the politicians as blowing a police whistle.

There is water, but no coffee. This is serious business. But there is a bounce in everyone’s step—this, I think, is a kind of happiness. A precious kind of joy.

Back in Brownsville, I put on my gold-colored shirt and visit the sixty homes on my list. The first man I encounter is delusional and goes on at length about a vision of Jesus that he had when he was six. As he finishes up the detailed description of what Jesus was wearing, he looks at me over his sunglasses, takes the sample ballot, and says, “And that is why I vote!”

I put a check next to "yes, I will vote" on my scorecard. He has made a connection between religion and politics that I think that I will leave alone.

The last person on my list turns out to be Lupita, the overall coordinator for getting out the vote in this community.

She is in the driver’s seat of her battered suburban, battling to get the car out of “Park.”

I wish I could help, but I am useless in these matters.

She told me that she had just dragged her sister’s car, parked on the street with the Suburban (the car stalled some place and won’t start). She had parked the Suburban right up behind the one functioning vehicle that remains, so things are an an impasse. Her family has places to go and things to do, but no one is going anywhere soon.

I am thinking that this is a great image for most of the working families here in our Valley along the border. People live surrounded and trapped by things that don’t work the way they should, be it a school system or a job, or a political system that is quickly forgetting what it means to work for the common good.

An unhappy person would give up. Or turn to violence.

I ask Lupita if she plans to vote in this election. She just laughs, a twinkle in her eye. I check the “yes” box next to her name, as she continues to jerk the gear shift back and forth.

As I walk down the driveway and back out onto the street, I am bouncing a little on my feet. I am enjoying the cool breeze, and savoring happiness.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

Alejandra's Home

Alejandra is proud of her home. It is not a house, but a travel trailer, parked in a small space at the back of her mother-in-law's house. We can reach the front door today because it hasn't rained in a while.

Her husband had paid $1,500 or so for the trailer, buying it from a friend who had lived in it for ten years, who had bought it from a couple from Minnesota who, twenty years ago, had used it while traveling through Mexico.

So it is not a house, but it is their home.

"Before," she said, "We would rent a small room from different people. But now we have a home."

Alejandra gave me a tour--a small breakfast nook; a small cooking area, a very small bedroom, and a small, small, small bathroom with a smaller shower stall. There is no hot water, as the boiler burnt out some time ago.

No air conditioning either, which I noticed as soon as I entered. The word "sauna" came to mind at first, but then I remembered that in a sauna you are not wearing clothing, you go there by choice and you can leave whenever you want.

Alejandra closed the door.

Sweat streaming down my face, I told her that I had just lost ten pounds. She laughed and said, "Our trailer is a double-use--a home and a fitness center!"

The screens were intact on the small windows, mercifully keeping out the mosquitoes and flies. Her one year old son was napping in the bed. In the evenings, Alejandra explained, they made a small bed on the floor for him. "We have to be very careful if we get up in the middle of the night not to step on him," she commented.

I carefully backed into the kitchen/dinette/living room. I sat at the small table while she poured me a glass of water, which she then sat upon a napkin.

She filled up a glass for herself, and then sat down opposite me. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. Alejandra sighed, and noted, "We are so blessed."

Then she took a measured, small sip from her glass of water, and smiled again.

The details of my visit were misleading. I had found an obviously poor woman living in a hot, leaky trailer—and she seemed happy about this. “A simple soul,” the uncomplicated part of my brain deduced.

But then we continued to talk and I learned that while this was definitely her home, and while it was a step up from a rental room, it was just that—one more step.

Alejandra had larger things in mind, which involved a decent home for her boy to grow up in and in which her family would create their living space. What struck me most about our conversation, though, was how she continually included the wider community in her dreams. How she would refer, over and again, about how nice it will be when “all of us have decent places to live.”

Her present home was indeed small. Her dreams—not so much.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

The Poor are Much Poorer than You Think

If there is one thing we can agree on, from regular folks to think-tank economists, it’s that more and more people are falling into poverty. What most of us don’t realize is just how poor they really are.

A new study puts it bluntly: In 2005, the richest quintile of Americans owned about 84 percent of the nation’s wealth. The poorest two quintiles put together owned less than 1 percent– an amount so small as to make them literally invisible on a diagram charting this inequity:

The actual United States wealth distribution plotted against the estimated and ideal distribution across all respondents. Because of their small percentage share of total wealth, both the 4th and 5th quintile of earners are not visible in the "Actual" diagram.

You can draw your own conclusions about the ways the recession has affected these numbers. Here’s the back-story: In 2005, Michael Norton, of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, of Duke University, polled 5,522 people – a nationally representative sample of women and men from 47 states, some rich, others middle class or poor; some leaning Republican, others voting Democratic – and asked them a series of questions about wealth in the United States. The result? None of them, not even the poorest, had any idea about the degree of inequity that is our status quo.

For example, the respondents estimated that the middle class owned about 10 percent of American wealth, though actually it’s just 3 percent.

“Americans appear to drastically underestimate the current level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote in, “suggesting they may simply be unaware of the gap.”

Perhaps more surprising, very few of us – including the richest – believe that things should be this way. When group members sketched their notion of an ideal wealth distribution, they suggested that the top quintile own just 32 percent of the nation’s overall wealth, a division more closely mirroring Sweden. Yet all groups, even the very poorest, also desired some inequality.

The takeaway? We may fight tooth and nail about immigration and taxation but when it comes to a vision of the country we all want to live in, certain truths prevail. As the authors wrote: "Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation and income.”

The Dream Act

Some background:

This Tuesday, a marvelous piece of humanitarian relief for children will be considered by the United States Senate. This relief is not intended for the children of the Sudan, nor for the children of the flooded plains of Pakistan nor those children living on the streets of Port au Prince in Haiti. Ojalá que fuera así, but perhaps in another moment.

This particular legislative action, however, is no small thing. It is an offer of relief for over a million children, young people who live in our own communities here in the United States. Many of them attend our neighborhood schools and local colleges, and worship alongside us on Sundays.

The wrong that this act addresses and seeks to fix is the nightmarish situation of children who, over the past two decades, were brought to the US by their parents. The parents over stayed the time granted them by their visas or perhaps entered the country without being documented properly. The children--who had no say in the decision of their parents to immigrate--now live in the United States illegally.

One child is "legal" the other child is "illegal."

I use the term "illegally" intentionally, for although there is no moral or ethical reason for blaming the children for their immigration status, the loudmouths and knuckleheads who populate our nation's airwaves are busy demonizing them. In these peoples' minds, these children are somehow "criminals" who "should not be awarded for their crimes." As if there was malevolence in these children's hearts. As if they were even capable of such "illegality" at the time that a mom or a dad packed them up and took them to the United States.

The children, especially as they become young men and women, however, know what it is to live as if one were "illegal." To worry, constantly, that they might be picked up by the Border Patrol and sent to a country about which they have only studied. To know that however hard you might work at your studies, that it might all be in vain. To live with the crushing anxiety of being "neither here nor there." And to have to keep that a secret.

For a decade now, national congressional leaders have proposed to right this wrong, to extend to these young people a hope and a homeland. The appropriately named "Dream Act" was sponsored by Senator McCain and has had the support of a plethora of both Democrats and Republicans. It has failed in the past because it was made a part of the larger immigration reform efforts. This time around, however, the Dream Act is being attached to the Defense Department's budget.

I ask you to join my prayer that this time the Senate gets it right and votes to add the Dream Act to our nation's legacy, thus creating a pathway to legal residence for those young people who are our modern men and women "without a country."

Four sets of dreams; two of them to be deferred, unless the Dream Act is passed.

There are some conditions to the bill, namely, that the young people be of good character and either enroll in college or enlist in the military (thus the Defense Department's interest).

On Tuesday, the Senate is taking a vote on whether to add the Dream Act to this bill, which would create a pathway to legal residence for those children who were brought to the USA by their parents. Should that happen, in my community alone, 10,000 children and their families will break out dancing and singing. With that vote, these young people will be recognized for what they know they are--members of our communities.

They have all grown up here. They have all been educated here. Every school day morning they have stood before the American flag and made the pledge of allegiance. They read and write and speak English; they dream dreams of what they will do when they grow up. But until the Dream Act passes, they remain in hiding, hostages to the decisions that someone else made some time ago.

Should the Dream Act pass, the lovely Claudia, a student who finished college with straight A's and simply wants to teach grade school could apply for a job as a teacher. Our schools need Claudia in the worst way.

Should the Dream Act pass, Eric, an extraordinary young man with a burning desire to study medicine would in fact be able to continue his studies. Eric tells me that he would simply like to be a family practice physician. "I like to help people," he says, "that's all I ask, is to be able to help people."

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

From Homeless to Dishwasher: Rebirth Through Finding a New Job

While sitting in the café lobby of a brand new tech building in North San Jose, I signed my name on the last piece of paper of an employee packet for my new job as a dishwasher at a national catering company. It felt good to be able to shake the bosses hand after I filled out the forms, or even have a boss to shake hands once again. I feel reborn.

Since March of 2009 I have been lead on a wild goose chase for the perfect full-time job. I have traveled across the state, even went outside of the state pursuing odd jobs of varying tasks -- I’ve worked in event set-up, was a security guard, and even a traveling soap salesman. After a year, I was still lost and confused, and ultimately frustrated with the economy, employers and myself.

It wasn’t easy getting this job. I had been staying on the streets, had to get cleaned up at a public restroom downtown, and had to travel three hours using my last five dollars, just hoping to land it. But I got it.

After leaving the building of my future livelihood, on the light-rail back to San Jose from Milpitas, I couldn’t help but to look back and take a glance in disbelief. I finally got another opportunity to have full-time employment, and even have medical and dental benefits, something very few people my age (at 23-years-old) have through their work. Having a job means I can really live again. When I say live, I mean actually live a decent life of renting my own pad again, buy some new clothes, pay for a decent meal, and finally being able to enjoy things without having to be dependent or having to wait on someone to help me with a handout.

What the high unemployment statistics don’t show, is the direct hit mentally, even nervous breakdowns, that not having a job can have on a person. Unemployment can steal all of the faith you had, right from inside of you.

After a few days into the new job I also made a new friend at work. We got along, and he was nice enough too even let me stay at his house with his family. While staying there, I noticed a jump in lifestyles. What I have thought of privileges for the past few years, is pretty much normal day to day life for others. I was so used to sleeping on the street, that even in the apartment I slept with all my clothes and shoes on. It took a while to know that I can actually fully sleep, and not have to worry if anyone was trying to harm me or take any of my belongings, that I could really just rest. Unemployment becomes psychological because it forces you to create a completely different lifestyle of what you once had, and you can get used to that lifestyle.

I noticed what I had gotten used to as someone without income when I got my first check. We went shopping and I felt I had splurged a little bit on myself – buying some new clothes. It had been so long, I didn’t know any of my sizes, and was scared to put them on, because I didn’t want to get them dirty. I was terrified of putting it on because I wasn’t sure of how long it would be until I would receive some new clothes. It was a habit from the streets, so it took a while for it to sink in that I was working full-time, making decent money and I could buy some more clothes and afford to wash them.

I’ve been working at my new job for a few months now and am getting used to the stable living. The work may be tedious manual labor, but every two weeks I look at my paycheck and smile. After a hard day’s work I get to go home to take a shower, watch tv, or just chill.

With this new job, I feel as though this is the start of a new foundation for my life with a grand opening. It’s like watching a building being built. My foundation has been built on an empty lot with bad piping and bad soil, with sewer water running everywhere. But with every new layer of foundation laid-down comes a purification from the new piping and new soil.

My first level of my construction has already started with my housing situation becoming stabilized and starting a bank account. Even though I have only 25 bones in my checking account, it sure feels good to have 25 bucks than nothing at all.

I still have friends that are still lost in the mix of unemployment, doubting their own capabilities of getting back into the workforce, school, or society for that matter. The feeling of rejection can haunt anyone, and scare them away from an opportunity that could be theirs if they reach out for it. Those feelings really just interfere with the greatness that we all know deep down inside that we can accomplish.

Written by Alex Gutierrez, a writer for Silicon Valley De-Bug.