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On Turning 50

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Last week I turned fifty, and someone asked me what was the most important thing I had learned in half a century of life. I sighed. Never having been one to make too much of personal landmarks, my response was that this was just another day.

And now that that day and that question are already past, what matters most is the unspeakable beauty of this second as my fingers touch the keyboard, and I breath in and out and listen to the sound of my son singing in the background, my wife talking to the cat, and the birds chirping in the branches of the tree outside my window.   [Read more…]

The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: The Korean War Years

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Veterans of World War II returned home deeply changed by their experience. They found that Logan Heights and San Diego had also been changed by the war. The effort to find a new normalcy would be interrupted by the Korean War.

This is part I of the Korean War and the 1950s, viewed through the experiences of Johnny Leyva who grew up in Logan Heights.
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Losing One’s Perch on America’s Finest Tourist Plantation

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San Diego is becoming a glamorous plantation.

Its people fight for a degree of control over their lives and are left to fight among themselves over whether they get sidewalk repair or a new stadium. A water shortage is not because we grow avocados in a desert, it is because we take too many showers for too many minutes.

Homelessness is a problem because lazy people don’t want to work. If they got themselves jobs they could buy a condo in Mission Valley starting at the low 400s.   [Read more…]

Protecting Mauna Kea: Stopping Murder-Suicide

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By Will Falk

When people have asked me why I am going to Hawai’i to help protect Mauna Kea and my answer involves words like “sacredness” or “spiritual,” I am surprised whenever I see the grimaces.

I often get an explanation like this, “I support indigenous people, of course, but the telescope is for science. Isn’t it a little…superstitious to block an astronomy project for a mountain?” I said I was surprised, but I shouldn’t be. Spirituality, I forgot, is anathema in many leftist circles.

It shouldn’t be.   [Read more…]

Chronicles of a Nerfherder’s Wife: Raising a Jedi in the Modern Age

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May the Fourth Be with You!

By Olympia Andrade Beltrán

My husband and I are sci-fi nerds. There. I said it. We share a deep love for Star Wars that started in our youth. I was only a year old when Star Wars came out, and four years old when Empire Strikes Back was released… but I remember Return of the Jedi as the most mesmerizing, fantastic movie experience in all of my short 7 years on this planet.   [Read more…]

It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid

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You can’t decry the social problems of Baltimore while politically promoting the very kind of trade policy that helped cause them…

Last week when the Baltimore Orioles played a game without fans in Camden Yard, there was much media coverage marking how the surreal event was unprecedented in American sports.

Perhaps, but it was not completely without precedent globally as the 1987 soccer match played to an empty stadium in Madrid, Spain came before it.

On the occasion of that strange contest, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard observed that “thousands of fans besieged the stadium but no one got in” and that this punishment of unruly soccer fans did much to “exemplify the terroristic hyperrealism of our world, a world where the ‘real’ event occurs in a vacuum, stripped of its context, visible only from afar, televisually.”   [Read more…]

Mayor Faulconer’s Stealth Re-Election Campaign Emerges

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By Doug Porter

You’d think that One San Diego, the sort-of government operated non-governmental organization (GONGO) charged with drumming up tea and sympathy for the under-served parts of the city, would be smart enough to stage an event in one of those neighborhoods without engaging in petty partisan politics. But you’d be wrong.

Take, for instance, the Community Forum on Jobs scheduled for this evening (April 28) at the Barrio Station. Mayor Kevin Faulconer will be joined by representatives of the Workforce Partnership, UC San Diego and the Chamber of Commerce to present the “next generation of jobs programs.”

None of the organizations or politicians involved even informed–much less invited–David Alvarez, the City Councilman representing both the locale for the event and a district facing serious challenges in employment.   [Read more…]

Civic San Diego: The Kiss of Death for San Diego Neighborhoods

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By Norma Damashek

The city of San Diego has first-class universities, first-class biotech companies, first-class ethnic restaurants, first-class theater, first-class engineers, artists, and musicians. Also: Our city has first-class standing as a prototype of community-based planning.

Who would have guessed that during the heady years of the 1960s while the Pump House kids were tripping the waves fantastic at Windansea Beach, other San Diegans – more firmly-grounded and civic-minded – were partnering with City Hall as official members of newly-created community planning groups. The La Jolla community plan was the city’s first. Then the Peninsula plan. Soon came the others.

Half a century later there are more than 40 recognized community planning groups throughout the city, where locally-elected members meet monthly to opine on neighborhood land-use issues, community goals, and proposed real estate development and relay their advice and recommendations to city officials.   [Read more…]

Right-wing Media Exploits Unrest in Baltimore to Push ‘Race War’ Narrative

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By Adam Johnson / Alternet

When Breitbart’s Matt Boyle isn’t framing xenophobia as “pro-worker” or rambling on about a big gay hate machine (don’t ask), he’s attending baseball games with his family. A harmless enough act, and one I’m glad to see rightwing demagogues and communists alike can agree is a wonderful way to spend a spring evening.

While attending last night’s Orioles game, however, things quickly got out of hand for the Breitbart journo when unrest resulting from the apparent police killing of Freddie Gray boiled over into property damage and “clashes” between police and angry citizens outside of Camden Yards baseball stadium.

Boyle’s piece begins with the type of breathless hysteria one would expect from Breitbart: “War Zone: Baltimore Erupts Into Violence, Chaos as #BlackLivesMatter Riots Rage.”   [Read more…]

Is San Diego Up for the Challenge of Marrying Environmental and Economic Justice?

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“A beautifully sustainable city that is the playground of the rich doesn’t work for us.”

By Jim Miller

Some of the best political news in America in quite a while happened last week in New York City. While much of the country is still under the sway of the climate-change denying right and thus fiddling while the world burns, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio came out with precisely the kind of bold, visionary plan that we need to address not just the existential threat of climate change but the equally pressing and dangerous trend toward deepening economic inequality.

Indeed, taking a page out of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, de Blasio made the interrelated nature of the two great crises of our age clear when outlining his “One New York: The Plan for a Just and Strong City” as he asserted that, “I believe fundamentally that you can’t have environmental sustainability without economic sustainability.”   [Read more…]

Still Groovin’ After all These Years

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By Ernie McCray

A few days before my 77th birthday – “Hip-Hip! Hooray!” – I stepped into the Big Kitchen Cafe and the Rascal’s were “Groovin'” on the stereo and I couldn’t help but go back into time to when that song played in the background of my life.

I was, in this moment in time, slowly getting out of an unhealthy situation and found myself truly “Groovin'” on many a “Sunday afternoon,” kicking it with a beautiful high spirited funny-as-hell woman who, it seemed to me, was looking for what I was looking for at that stage of my life: fun, with no strings attached. Turned out later, I was the only one looking for that. She was more in tune with “Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly…” We parted amiably.

And the music just keeps on playing, a constant in our lives, something to grab and hold on to. And I’ve basked in a whole lot of it in my 77 years.   [Read more…]

The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: Dancing and Dance Teachers

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From Luis López, Señora Villagrana and Nachita Hernández to Albert Flores

By Maria E. Garcia

Mr. Albert Flores started teaching dance lessons at Neighborhood House in 1940. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army to serve in World War II. He was taken prisoner of war. One of his big dreams was to become a professional dancer. He did try to realize his dream in Hollywood but was unsuccessful. His prized possession was a pair of shoes that were given to him by his idol José Greco. He would wear these shoes with great pride whenever he performed in San Diego. After his unsuccessful Hollywood experience he returned to San Diego and worked for the City of San Diego as a tree trimmer.   [Read more…]

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