The Laney College Journalism department.
After all the studying, the anxiety about finals, the signing up for the next semester, the digging in the pocket to assess the next textbook financial debacle, another semester is finally over. A security guard (perhaps, though he was not wearing a uniform) you have never seen before asks you to pull the door shut behind you. "Now try to get it open," he says. The doors are closed and locked. You can't go back in until the next semester, or maybe not ever, if you did something worse than flunking a course. The next day you see his picture in the paper as a representative from Amazon rain forests, protesting Chevron in Ecuador.
Keesha Washington, (l) with the award she
received from Gateway to College, a Laney
College program. They must have had the
award ceremony on the last day of school.
Someone is still there in that seemingly empty campus, behind a door where a person, not a machine, answers the telephone most days, even on national holidays. The sports editor was still there. They never stop working. They work 52/24/7. He doesn't give you an answer: he just gives you a clue. There's still a story here even though most of the people have gone home. It's
THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL.
You can get the Laney Tower online, but it's not the same as going to the newspaper office and getting one in person. Hot off the press, as they say. Production was the previous night. Some of the newspapers were still in stacks bound with plastic ties.
"Isn't it a little late in the semester to produce another newspaper?" I asked. (That wasn't being seductive, was it?) He just shrugged his shoulders.
I guess that was their way of having a final exam--a real deadline to meet. One last issue to get out before the guards lock the door and put the "for lease," sign on the window. No, not really. They won't put the school newspaper out of business like the real world where superhuman efforts keep a daily newspaper going until they can't get their papers delivered and they can't truthfully say they have enough circulation to claim the advertising they need to survive, even from advertisers who would forgive the newspaper for just about anything they might publish, that's how much they believe in freedom of speech.
The Oakland Tribune tower.
The Oakland Tribune was all we heard about and thought about when we were young. It was as if San Francisco didn't exist and the only thing that mattered was The Oakland Tribune and the Knowland family. And how Joe Knowland should have known his limits and not run for public office, because running a daily newspaper should have been enough power for him or for anyone. Some people just can't take no for an answer.
Laney College is close to the heart of the big city, if it has a heart. If the City of Oakland has a heart, it's the heart of a person who probably doesn't look like you or me. The person with a heart looks like Mayor Jean Quan.
You know you are in a big city when you see people who don't look just like you and there is writing in another language on the street signs. To you, they look like they came from a foreign country, and many of them did though most were probably born here. This is the biggest Chinatown in the U.S. except for New York and maybe San Francisco.
High on a tall city building, the U.S. flag flies alongside the red flag of the People's Republic of China. The third flag was the flag of the State of California, I think, or perhaps it was the flag of Mexico. I guess every city in the United States has a Chinese restaurant, and that's all most Americans knew about China until they started sending us manufactured items that were so cheap that they put American businesses out of business. It was, and still is, a price war. Some people were afraid that Americans would lose important skills, like shoe repair and sewing. Of course I heard about those two things because I am a woman and I get my shoes repaired before I wear them. Now the only place I can get the lift on my left shoe is at a shoe repair that is run by an Asian-American couple who hardly speak any English, so it's very difficult to communicate. It's called orthopedic work and not every shoe repair place does it.
High on a tall city building, the U.S. flag flies alongside the red flag of the People's Republic of China. The third flag was the flag of the State of California, I think, or perhaps it was the flag of Mexico. I guess every city in the United States has a Chinese restaurant, and that's all most Americans knew about China until they started sending us manufactured items that were so cheap that they put American businesses out of business. It was, and still is, a price war. Some people were afraid that Americans would lose important skills, like shoe repair and sewing. Of course I heard about those two things because I am a woman and I get my shoes repaired before I wear them. Now the only place I can get the lift on my left shoe is at a shoe repair that is run by an Asian-American couple who hardly speak any English, so it's very difficult to communicate. It's called orthopedic work and not every shoe repair place does it.
Mother and child.
They have people they care about too.
As a journalist I was told by lower downs (that's different from higher-ups) that I was not to take photos of Asian-American people. (I just assume they are all Americans, because I know some of them are bilingual and pretend they don't understand English.) Don't ask them where they are from, if they are from China. They are all told (by their school teachers) to tell you they are from the place of their ethnic heritage. But they are really bilingual Americans. Bilingual means smarter than most of us.
I guess if you are a tourist and wanted to take someone's picture, they might expect a tip. They don't want you to hang around the playground even though it's in the heart of the big city without a tall fence around it. Use your brains, if you have any. If I have to explain that to you, you shouldn't be walking around loose. Those words were my dad's words, I think. He just said this is how it is and didn't give many explanations. He would say it's their city and if they want to put a privacy fence around that playground, they will do it. We don't have to tell them what to do with their city. They don't need our help.
They have a street that doesn't go straight through downtown like all the others do. It forces you to make a left turn and go around through Chinatown one more time before you can leave, just in case you want to stop and shop. I think they know a lot about marketing. We could probably learn a lot from them.
The Laney Tower newspaper is named after
this building which you can see from
almost everywhere on the campus.
The architect was a genius.
I think if I take their photo and don't get their face in it, it doesn't count. Some people get to take photos and others don't. That's prejudice, aimed at me, maybe because I am not a cop. I guess to them I am too old, too fat, too white, don't wear nice clothes, and walk with my butt sticking out. But I am not the only one like that. The world is not an ideal place; people don't always do what they are supposed to do and behave as they ought to behave. It helps to be young and beautiful. But we just try to get along with them. We don't judge them. That's what my dad told me. And we enjoy eating their food, in their restaurants.
I am reminded of a little girl I met in a San Francisco middle school. She walked around with her head down as if someone had told her not to look at them, to bow her head. It reminded me of black people on the CCC campus who used to say to me in an antagonistic way "What are you looking at me for?" She looked like she had been put in a cage to show her the proper position of her head. She was the shape of a cage or a box. The teachers told me that when they put a lesson on the overhead projector, they had to give her a separate piece of paper because she would not raise her head to look at the wall. So they made accommodations for her and they taught her the same lessons the other kids learned. They thought it might have been child abuse that made her that way, and they assured me that I did not have to report it: that it had already been reported.
I am reminded of a little girl I met in a San Francisco middle school. She walked around with her head down as if someone had told her not to look at them, to bow her head. It reminded me of black people on the CCC campus who used to say to me in an antagonistic way "What are you looking at me for?" She looked like she had been put in a cage to show her the proper position of her head. She was the shape of a cage or a box. The teachers told me that when they put a lesson on the overhead projector, they had to give her a separate piece of paper because she would not raise her head to look at the wall. So they made accommodations for her and they taught her the same lessons the other kids learned. They thought it might have been child abuse that made her that way, and they assured me that I did not have to report it: that it had already been reported.
Here's the Rock, Paper, Scissors gallery
on Telegraph Avenue where there was a
big street party for First Friday when I was going
to Laney. I took a field trip to write about
First Friday and they sent a Laney College
staffer with me. He said we got
hit, though I did not feel anything. The next
day I awoke gasping for air. I don't know
what that was or why anyone would
want to hit a group of art patrons. I hope
it does not happen again.
The Rock Paper Scissors building is an old six-story city building. I wonder if they have an elevator or
if they have to walk up six floors. My son and I stayed in a Paris hotel where we had to walk up five floors. It cost less than the hotel with the elevator. It's possible to travel cheaply but not on nothing. There are no thin air youth hostels. You have to have SOME money and you can't count on getting work here in the US no matter what you have been told.
I was told that a person who is a cop in a big city, feels like the city belongs to him (or her). The only thing I can compare this to is Queen Elizabeth at the opening of Parliament when she told the world "This is MY Parliament." She has a strong sense of ownership. She didn't buy her votes: she inherited them.
So the person might say, that might be an ugly dog, but that's MY ugly dog so don't mess with him.
The cop thinks these are MY parking spaces and I can let a person park overtime or not because I am the one who has to give out the tickets for MY parking spaces. And if we don't want you in our city, we will let you know. You will understand our language. When it is time for you to go we will let you know. We will give you a ticket out of here if you park more than one minute beyond the time on the meter, like they did to me in Lafayette, right after I was hired to be a substitute teacher there. I think I lasted three days and then was hit on the freeway on my way to work. The traffic stopped suddenly in front of me and I was hit from behind.
The student government fought for, and won, the right
to have free bus passes for the students, but then
they did not have enough money to pay for
something else, from what I have been
able to figure out from their news stories.
The cop thinks this is MY college, and these are all my courses, and we have the best of everything in the big city, so at least you could say thank you for letting you go to college here even though you live in another district. Yes, there was a loophole that said I could go to another community college if they offered a course not given by the district I lived in. So I guess it's time for me to start looking at math courses there just in case the CCC professors get tired of me again. The Ecuadorians might be taking over the CCC campus and not want me around, since I am a Chevron sympathizer. They are my neighbors, after all.
From a distance all you will notice is the trash. I guess
finals were not too bad if that's all the trash they got.
You can see the big "NO" on this sign, so I guess
there was a Republican here at one time after all.
If you get a little closer, you can see what it is
saying "NO" to. I guess those are all things
the students wanted to do, like having big unauthorized, unofficial outdoor
concerts here, which they had to put a stop to.
If you click on this photo of Lake Merritt in back of
Laney College, you will see there is a man
walking two dogs, so I guess they make exceptions
to the no dogs rule here.
I was in my saying-no mode, just reverting back to the Ronald Reagan "just say no" era in a place where you would have to do a major search to find a Republican. I was in my dad's, "Say no as if your life depends on it," mode. Faced with true editorial genius, all I could think to do was say no, no, I do not want anyone to walk me to my car, unless he has a uniform on, that's how strong my attraction to them was. But at CCC they did not have enough of those men in uniform for me to have one too. (I guess they did not have a budget for uniforms: probably spent the money on dry erase markers and erasers.) At Laney they did have parking guards who wore a kind of uniform vest so you could see they were supposedly trained a little bit to be parking guards. But they didn't force me to accept an escort to my car. The parking lot is well-lighted and visible from many places on the second floor of the buildings across the street. Around 5 p.m. I went to my car and brought it from the north 40 to closer to the street. I wasn't asking for trouble or looking for any because I did not want any. People who go looking for trouble usually have no problem finding a lot of it. Believe me, if you are looking for trouble the people in Oakland can provide you with all you want, probably more than you want.
They got tired of me saying no to the editor of the journalism program at CCC when he asked me to take LSD with him. They were judging me on the actions of my ex husband I was married to 45 years ago, whom I only knew six weeks before we got married. We got married before he offered me LSD, though he took me to a renegade AA meeting that was pushing LSD, masquerading as a Unitarian singles group. I had never heard of LSD before that. Pretty slick to get married so you will have someone to blame things on that you are doing yourself. There had been a big article in Life or Look magazine about Timothy Leary and LSD. The author was Ed Leonard. When we got married Ed and Billie Leonard were my husband's best man. We were headed to California, though I did not want to go there, so we detoured through New York City where we lived for about a year before we came west.
I told the CCC editor no thanks. Been there, done that, don't want to go back. So the journalism advisor told me they were tired of me. They don't like so many no's.
Then I went to Laney and said, no I do not want to cover those riots. I did not want to get tear gassed again, like I had been at People's Park, Berkeley, even though I had a press card from the Highway Patrol. But I did not wait for Laney to kick me out, because other people were getting angry at me saying no to the journalism advisor there. They had a microphone in the journalism room that was being broadcast somewhere else, but I don't know where it came out on the other end. The only way I could know that was when I heard the words repeated back to me. But I was used to that because I had been a teacher.
I could tell by the way they sprayed me with psychedelic gas on campus that they didn't want me there. I went voluntarily. Thank goodness I could drop out nearly two thirds of the way through the course, but back in 1963, I couldn't drop out of Swarthmore when things were going wrong. I felt like Joe Msfldt from the Lil Abner comics. He brought his black civil rights cloud with him. The only way to get out of Swarthmore was to flunk out. Community college is different. It's more humane. I gave up on journalism and went back to Early Childhood Education courses. But I didn't stop writing. They didn't tell me not to write.
As a journalism major, I got to meet a lot of important people. One was Dr. Frank Chong, the president of the college, who looked like he got into a bad fight and his face was scarred. I know what that was from, because years ago my dermatologist gave me some cream for my hands that made my skin so thin I could pick it off with my fingernail. It left scars when I did that. That's scary. I guess Dr. Chong had been told to put it on his face. They don't tell you what the cream is going to do until it is too late. There ought to be a law against that.
The construction program is one of the most impressive
programs at Laney. It's the jewel in the crown, you
might say. They build a real two story house underneath
a suspended roof. Sorry I do not know the technical name
for the kind of roof this is. I studied modern architecture
back in 1962 at Swarthmore,
and all I can remember is flying buttresses. In fact my
son and I traveled to Western Europe in 1978
and saw flying buttresses on many cathedrals
there. What a thrill. How many people do you
know who go to Europe to go to church? Probably not
a whole lot. We were on a budget and most of
those churches do not charge anything to get in.
We bought a Eurailpass before we left the states,
and went to youth hostels in Europe,
a very safe way to travel if you stay on the beaten path.
We flew Laker Airlines standby. I went bankrupt when we got back. They were calling me up day and night to sell my home and my business. It was very frightening. I could not find anyone who would loan me $2,000 to keep me out of bankruptcy. Nobody would ever leave the ghetto if they had their way.
I had borrowed money from my parents to fly to Europe because an ex-Marine called me from London and told me he had had another lung collapse and could I please go to see him. I did not get cured of my eating disorder until we got back from Europe--that was 26 years with an eating disorder. I think the Europeans took an interest in my health problems.
Even though I was getting health care from the county clinic most of that time, they did not cure me of that eating disorder until around 1984. I think my parents did not want me to get cured, or else it was because my dad had disowned me as a result of me being in the civil rights movement and having birth defects, although I think he had been wanting to do that to me ever since I was a small child. It did not help that I had flunked out of Swarthmore although my dad had predicted that I would not graduate from Swarthmore because HE had not graduated from college and had to go to night school for nine years to become a chemist. He said that if he had to do that, I would have to do that too.
Maybe I got born back while my dad was going to college, so he had to drop out and go to work, so that messed up his college career, I don't know, he didn't go into details about why I wasn't going to graduate from college on his dime. Maybe it was because I was on a high school committee to desegregate the Charlotte public schools, which got him in hot water with his white citizen council friends. I had been told we had moved to the south to help implement the civil rights acts of the 1950's, so I got on a high school committee which did not do much. But it was enough for my dad to feel that I was threatening his job. I guess their system of loyalty means they have to throw their own child overboard if one of their buddies wants them to. Even slavery was not that bad. In slavery, someone else threw the child overboard while they were manacled to the ship down below.
Also at my first wedding, he threw the wine glass into the fireplace at the minister's house. That was supposed to signify the breaking of the woman's spirit by getting her fired from all her jobs. Wine--spirits--get it? I guess he could not find anyone willing to actually kill me, since they do not have murder for hire around here, legally, anyway, so the people here kept me alive in Point Richmond all my adult life, while my parents lived in the east, divorced and went their separate ways. A great deal of that time was spent going to community college trying to pull up my GPA from my Swarthmore days. I left Swarthmore with a D minus GPA. I would have been a lot better off if they had kicked me out after my freshman year, but they didn't do that. They kept me there for three years. They liked my dad's money and I wasn't much trouble to have around.
I have tried to make a contribution and not just do nothing, not just sit around watching TV and eating bonbons. I have been almost continuously enrolled at CCC for nearly 25 years until equal rights for women was passed so I got a little help from college counseling, which I had not had up until that time. The black male counselor had just laughed at me and told me my units were too old to transfer, which was not true. They did not see me as college material despite the fact I had been enrolled in their college for years. And then the California State legislature passed a law forcing the community colleges to transfer their students to the state universities.
My dad had predicted that staying out of trouble was going to be a full time job for me. I guess he had told people to try to get me to do bad things. It reminds me of the kids gang on our street when I was a kid. They dared me to do stuff (like putting snow in the mailbox) and I always fell for it and hardly ever said no. They dared me to ride my bike no hands and I got hit by a car. They called me a tomboy when I sledded down the hill in the street and was ditched by the bigger kids (who probably saw the car coming). What fun that was. We skated on the lake at the nearby Watchung Indian reservation (that had no Indians living there.) I did not get much adult supervision, but that's how it was for everyone on that street. Later on my parents hovered over me to get me to do my homework, so I guess the school had caught up with them and was insisting that I get more supervision.
My dad's control methods including spanking me, yelling at me, and asking me what I wanted so as to be sure to give me something else. After a while a person gives up having their own will or goals and only has the goals the other person gives them. All the choices are made for that person. They decided that I would go to college and where I would go. I applied to the three colleges they told me to apply for and was accepted at all three. They asked me which one I wanted to go to and I told them I wanted to go to Antioch. They said I was not mature enough to go to Antioch and they wanted me to go to Swarthmore, which had an "in loco parentis," program, whatever that meant. Normally a person would pore over the catalogs of colleges that cost so much money. I knew that just paying money to go to college was not going to garantee me a degree, that I would have to earn it. So I went to Swarthmore.
Then my dad acted like he was mad at me for choosing such an expensive college, when actually they had chosen it for me. I couldn't resist them. I had to do what they wanted. The idea of making wise choices had never been presented to me until I was long a grownup and attending Contra Costa College. I met a woman who was taking Early Childhood Education courses. I asked her what was the most important thing she had learned so far. She said, "We learn how to help them make wise choices."
The idea of having a choice had never been offered to me before. In my early life I only learned obedience. And my husband has said that my son does not have a choice. I said I think the army gives them choices, but my husband said that MY son did not have choices. So I guess my mother and father had decided to make his choices for him just like they did to me. I do not know how they can reach right into the officer corps and make choices for my son, but I guess that's what they do. It must be the old boy network. I am against that, because the choices they made for me were not good choices. The high school's choices were much better. Maybe I am guilty of that myself because I told him I did not want him to go to Afghanistan, because it is in the Soviet Union and I heard so much about communism when he was young, that I did not think of it as a friendly place. And I asked him to go help Congressman Garamendi when Rep. G. was asking for help in Washington, DC, because my son lives there and knows his way around. Well, that's two things in the more than 20 years he has been in the military, so maybe that's not too bad. He does not take orders from me and he would not even tell me whether he had gone to Congressman Garamendi's aid or not. What was I supposed to do? I am in California and the Congress is in Washington DC. I was a volunteer in the Congressman's campaign. Well, Congressman Miller will help him. I cannot think of another person who could give more, better help to anyone than Congressman Miller.
The high school gave me the opportunity to have a career in advertising, drawing pictures for newspaper ads, but my parents turned it down. They wanted me to go to college. My mother actually got that career for herself. She became the top advertising salesperson on the daily newspaper. And I wasn't around to compete with her or help her because I was in California by then. The newspaper provided her with a close friend who was just like a daughter to her, a better daughter than I was. And she still is. She is my friend too. But it's too late now to make any more wise choices. I am not going to be able to hang on to a job for longer than a few days, since as my dad said, staying out of trouble was going to be a full time job for me. They try to get me to do the wrong things and I have to say no.
I could travel again but I have spent the money on tools to make jewelry with. I can't do everything. I can't find tools made in the U.S.A., as the Congressman wants me to do. All the tools are made somewhere else. But I am going to make my own tool to make anticlastic bracelets by using a scroll saw made in Taiwan. And if I don't get a tax break for having a small business, well, that's the way it is. I'll just pay full fare. I have a lot of money invested in equipment and haven't sold any jewelry yet. But I'm going to. We take out tax return form to an IRS agent to figure out how much we owe. This year we had an IRS agent AND a CPA to do our taxes. If you think we are not reporting everything, talk to them about it. Maybe there is someone out there saying she is me, making money, and I do not know about it. They call it mocking the person. I am very grateful to my husband for continuing to support me. I have stopped using credit cards, except the pre-paid kind, although I did buy a math textbook the other day. I probably should have used the prepaid card for that. I actually prefer to write checks.
I might be able to make money running a small neighborhood newspaper but it's essential to have the support from my husband and the rest of my family to do that because they are affected by it. If they don't want it, I don't do it. I don't want to start putting out a newspaper and when it starts getting successful, my mother comes west and tells me to give up my newspaper, because the local people want me to sell it or stop publishing it. I had been told to stay out of politics. I had endorsed an incumbent supervisor instead of the candidate they wanted. I had been told that my endorsement would help defeat a candidate. Everyone has political opposition at some time in their lives. You don't just roll over and play dead, but these people around here are formidable.
When I was a child, my dad told me that the cops were just like nazi storm troopers and I was not to call 911 unless I was close to death. I guess he was afraid they would come to the house and take me away from them. He said there was still a lot of anti-semitism in the United States even though we had won the war and rescued the Jews and the American soldiers from the concentration camps. After that, my ex-husband told me not to call the cops when we saw a man sprawled on the floor of a hallway in a cheap New York City hotel, or when people were using illegal drugs. I was raised to be obedient to those people. I am a little older now and have been independent for a long time. When my current husband and I got married, I was told by some church people that I would have to obey him, like it or not. "Get used to it," they told me. He had said several times that I did not have to obey him, but they might have him believing it by now. He usually gives me good advice, but not always.
After I became a substitute teacher, each school I went to in San Francisco checked to make sure that I would call the school security guard for help if I needed it. So when my aged father and his third wife had a small fire in their bedroom while I was visiting there and I called the fire department to come out and put out that fire, my dad wanted to know how I knew to call the fire department. He had trained me not to call anyone for help. His wife was saying, "Jean is a hero for calling the fire department," but my dad was just mad about it. He would not say that to please or agree with her or for any reason. The only hero in that house was him.
I knew I was going against his wishes when I picked up that telephone to call for help, but I did not want to let that mattress fire smolder and burn that nice old house down. And I supposed they would have me to blame it on since I was visiting there, even though they had tightly tucked in the electric blanket and put the electric heater right next to the bathtub and other things like that. She had insisted on buying a house although he did not want to. They probably bought it with money she had inherited from her first husband who dropped dead on a golf course with a heart attack. I guess they were very poor although I really did not know anything about their income. They were married for many years and finally went to live in a retirement home in New Jersey.
I think my dad had a pension from a corporation he had worked for most of his life that was gradually becoming less valuable with inflation. They were always very secretive about their income and what things cost. I doubt that he would have been emotionally able to tell me how much money he had even if I wanted to help him financially, whereas I had been trained to tell all my income and expenses every month to the county.
People are usually not willing to help a person financially on an ongoing basis without some information about their financial situation. Maybe my mother's desire to bust me for not reporting every last nickel and dime of income did not help the situation, since she was sure that I would not report everything because in her world people hide their income and are secretive about it, and she wanted me to be cut off from welfare, but she was also fussy about what job was suitable for me as part of her family. I thought perhaps if I just dropped dead, it would make them happy, while they were figuring out ways to get me fired from my job and cut off from welfare which was all I had to support myself and could not find a husband to support me, but I could not figure out a way to do that and stay alive too.
Now they are on Social Security so they are the ones who are receiving welfare and no one is trying to get them cut off from it. But really, as far as they are concerned, they got me out of their lives in 1963 when I got married and my ex began to take me out to California to dump me here. They had brief moments of pride when I graduated with a B.A in art education but could not understand what I wanted with an M.A. I had gone back to my original goal of becoming an artist, even though the Vocational Rehab people I went to while still attending CCC had told me that they would pay for me to become a teacher but not an artist, which had been my childhood goal. So I thought they must have been talking to my mother. I went through college at San Francisco state without counseling that could have steered me to the commercial art course of study, because my parents idea of art was fine art, although my mother had worked in the advertising department of the daily newspaper, so she should have known about commercial art. Anyway, Voc Rehab did not pay for me to become an artist OR a teacher. I paid for that myself by borrowing $23,000 from the federal government and I repaid $15,000 of that loan when I received some money from my dad when they said he was dead. I figured he told them to tell me he was dead so he could get me out of his hair once and for all. But he is probably still alive somewhere in the east.
My relatives don't need the money enough to participate in putting out a small monthly newspaper. I can't just think about myself. I have to think about the people who supposedly love me, who support me, and the people they hang around with who go crazy worrying about bad press. And they talk about dying from exposure and not wanting their spouse to know they were in a bar, and so on and so forth, like I actually cared. No, I don't write news, I just write free publicity--good publicity. I got over the idea of publishing news a long time ago. I could rent my spare room if I had a new roof and a decent bathroom. I could have a bed and breakfast place, though it's not zoned for that. I could probably get a variance. They usually say only one person at a time to your house for a home-based business, though you can have up to eight kids for a child care business. I could just walk around giving people my resume and hope for a typing job.
I guess those dermatologists don't get paid enough from MediCal or Medicare: that's what I have been told, anyway. My dermatologist said he was in a civil war and he wanted me to print up a little flier that talked about how the soldier had come home to fight the standing corn. He said he was a student of the civil war. That was a long time ago, more than 20 years ago. There was a skin cancer on my foot and he said it was like smoke coming from the ground. It turned out to be breast cancer.
If you get treated in a hospital where all the nurses are right-to-lifers who believe in right-to-life only for patients who are politically correct, then confidentiality about abortion becomes critically important, doesn't it? Rep. Barbara Lee wrote a book about representing people who had abortions, I guess because they had an abortion clinic in Oakland called the Feminist Women's Health Clinic. They mostly did suction abortions, otherwise known as egg donations. Not third trimester abortions. I think nobody does that, not legally anyway. They do have preemies but I think that's not considered abortion and nobody has ever thought of that as abortion.
I have heard of a baby being born dead, but it wasn't my baby because mine was born live and is still alive. It's a very sad event when a baby is born dead. Then they just have to try to have another one until they get a live one, unless something terrible has gone wrong and the woman can't have babies anymore.
I had one child and did not have another one because, aside from not being married, and being warned by my mother not to have a child if I wasn't married; as my eating disorder illness progressed, I became dehydrated and had low blood pressure and anemia and bad teeth because of the stomach acid from throwing up my meals. In that illness the throat muscles become trained to throw up at will and the normal nausea does not occur. It's a very debilitating illness and a baby born after nine months in that environment would have been dehydrated and malnourished if it survived at all. I did not want to give any children with disabilities to the government to do experiments on, so I did not get pregnant again after my first child.
The social consequences to the woman who gets an abortion is what hasn't been talked about. She probably does not know that there are any consequences beyond losing her pregnancy. All people have heard about are that occasionally a doctor gets murdered for performing abortions, and that clinics get picketed. You don't hear about the horrible scapegoating and ostracism of a woman if it becomes widely known that she has had an abortion, and the likelihood that she will be raped and all her relationships broken up. That happens even if the pregnancy was done to her by a gang who drugged her with the intention of getting her to sell her baby for support to get her off welfare and then to give it up for adoption. She is basically becoming a brood mare popping out babies once a year for couples who have delayed childbearing. She gets off welfare that way so the county has more money to pay the doctors. She doesn't have a chance in hell of having a normal married relationship after that happens to her. That never seemed like something I could do because I could not bear the idea of giving up my child after having the first one. I thought having a child was the best thing that ever happened to me, but I know that many women do not feel that way.
I think there are doctors who can't get steady work, who become teachers because they can't attract patients and they don't get hired by hospitals for whatever reason--not good at interviews or something. Obviously if you are a principal who has to choose between having a medical doctor on your payroll or a teacher, you are just going to say goodbye to the teacher. I guess they figure out a way to give them a credential. But believe me, teacher college is not a waste of time. That teacher training is very helpful preparation to becoming a teacher.
The architecture is memorable.
All the ivy here is in people's minds.
The architecture is supposed to give
the feeling of being in a concrete canyon,
and it does. Way up high on the brick
wall is a plastic bag being blown around by
the wind. This litter and trash has so enraged the
Richmond city fathers that they have banned
plastic bags or are planning to. But this is Oakland.
They don't like it, but they can live with it.
The Oakland Museum across from the campus
is behind that white wall. It recently got a
major renovation.
The faculty was having a show in the art
gallery. They have a well-attended
gallery management class appropriate in a big
city with a lot of art venues.
This is the Oakland Unified School District
administration building across from the Laney campus.
Very elegant and dignified.
High ceilings, cool in the summer, but very old.
There were no cars parked there because it
was late in the day and most people had gone
home from work.
This is the Laney College child care center that
is scheduled to be closed because of lack of support
from the State of California for early
childhood funds that they had previously
given to keep it open.
One more last look at the big city
before I head on home to Richmond. The Oakland City
Center near BART and the city hall is
really beautiful. The Art and Soul festival is there and
has replaced the Festival at the Lake that they
used to have.
I went to Oakland yesterday to go to a jewelry supply store and then decided to hang around and
wait for the traffic to clear up before heading home. Where could I go hang out while I waited for the traffic to clear? Why, back to college, of course, on THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL. It's a peaceful, clean place when there are no people there. No there there and no people there either, until June.#
