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SKEPTIC'S JOURNAL
La Vie Americaine, Chapitre Un, 2005
By Jeanette Pontacq
I was a student
at UC-Berkeley during the FSM imbroglio and the Vietnam War. After graduation,
I worked for a year to earn enough to move to France. Upon arrival in France, I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to learn French if I
wanted to live there for real. So I enrolled in L'Alliance Francaise and La
Sorbonne, for total immersion, while I worked au pair. Speaking English was not
an option at school, but there were so many English-speakers hanging around Paris at that time, along with Europeans
wanting to speak English, that immersion got watered down and I was hard put to
become completely fluent in French, even after two years.
I tell you this old story because Reed Hastings just lost his seat on the
California State Board of Education. He was thrown off the Board because he
tried to require waivered bilingual classrooms to teach in English for at least
2.5 hours daily or lose federal funds. Hastings, who speaks both English and
Spanish fluently, had served twice as the Board's president with distinction,
and was generally considered a very intelligent and knowledgeable member. His
day job is running Netflix, the DVD subscription service that he founded.
Representative Don Perata voted against Hastings, but said losing him was "regrettable." It was obviously not
regrettable enough for Perata to act his conscience instead of caving in to
Latino special interest groups.
Reed Hastings was right. The rest of the world knows that total immersion is
the way to go to get children up to par and part of the mainstream quickly. And
Hastings was not even asking for total
immersion all day... just for 2.5 hours! The vote to oust Hastings was a classic example of political
cowardice on the part of state Democrats in the face of the growing clout of
Latinos. Unfortunately, the result is that too many kids will be kept as
second-class citizens by not making good English a priority. It is so counter
productive that it makes one want to cry.
Moving on... in case you missed the news, the three public libraries in the
town of Salinas have closed for an indefinite
period as of January, 2005. Why should you care? Because Salinas is the canary in the California coal mine. Salinas finds itself required to reduce its
community services by $9.5 million dollars. More than libraries are on the
chopping block. In California itself, serious cuts are being made
that impact the quality of life, and even the life expectancy, of those with no
place at the political table: children, the disabled, seniors and minorities.
The State of California has been "taking" county
property tax receipts for the last several years to bolster its own deficit
spending. Thus the need for the counties to reach down to the local residents
to pay again for what they thought they thought they were paying for via their
property taxes.
Take a look at the add-ons to support this and that for your local
communities. In West Marin, property owners pay a line item amount for School
Bonds, Water Bonds, the Fire Departments, Shoreline Schools, Paramedics and our Libraries.
These individual assessments (generally called parcel taxes) are over and above
the basic assessment on the worth of the property in question (per Proposition
13). Next year, there will even be another additional assessment to support our
recent inclusion in the Marin/Sonoma Vector Control District. Marin has been
able to pay extra to keep services, but poorer towns (like Salinas) cannot. The division between haves
and have-nots is widening to a chasm.
How all this happened is a long, unsavory, corrupt and disheartening saga,
based on special interests and a total lack of understanding that the people
should come first, not business interests.
Our elected officials seem unable to cut through the maze of foolish and
greed-driven legislature that hobbles any semblance of financial reality. Joe
Nation, for example, is trying to lower the number of votes it would take to
vote in new parcel taxes on property owners. This, instead of having the
courage to simply take away Prop 13 protection from the big box stores and
large commercial properties, leaving homeowners alone. Common sense is in short
supply, while short-term fixes based on protecting greed is rampant.
So watch the rich build gates to protect their property while the other end
of the financial spectrum becomes more unstable. Water rights, casinos,
transportation breakdowns, infrastructure deterioration, a population explosion
and the dumbing down of our formerly-excellent education system are only a few
of the issues that seem insolvable in this time of cowardice.
Locally, while East Marin continues to make itself into one big parking lot
with less and less charm, at least West Marin is still here, and the tides come
in and go out on time, even if Tomales Bay is somewhat polluted and Bolinas
Lagoon is filling up. Population pressure is increasing here too. Mostly, new
residents have no idea what West Marin has been about and only want a place to
escape from what is happening elsewhere. Which puts more and more pressure on
what is left of long-time activists to keep standing up for West Marin. I
wonder what it will all look like in ten years?