Angela Bacca

I am very disappointed in the city government of San Francisco, and all the parties involved in conning the public and ass-kissing of the Chinese government.

I haven’t seen this yet anywhere in the news, but the mobs of protesters along the Embarcadero yesterday were not always non-violent, and I have already heard a few rumors that the Chinese government organized and paid pro-Chinese protesters to stake out large spots along the route. I witnessed one angry, younger, group of pro-Chinese supporters tear apart a large “Free Tibet“ poster and shout angrily at the Tibetan supporters. This ended in hitting, yelling, and shoving. Remarkably, everyone still had out their video cameras, cell phones, and SLRs- it will only be a matter of days before the world sees what happened inside every scuffle in every part of all the crowds.

It was impressive to see the mix of people who had shown up. It was a bit of the typical San Francisco public event crowd- including the faint smell of pot and drunks with the words “Free Tibet” written on their face shouting as if they were really at a big public frat party. More than this however, I saw business people holding signs saying “Another Admin for a Free Tibet”, high school aged kids with “Another Latina for a Free Tibet”, “Another Student for a Free Tibet”, dread-locked hippies with “Another Vegan for a Free Tibet”. All of San Francisco was there to show the world what they thought.

Still, the situation held an air of hypocrisy, not only because perhaps about 25% of the pro-Tibet protesters couldn’t point it out to you on the map, but also because San Francisco is still an American city. Do Americans have any right to protest China, when we violate the human rights of our own right here, in Guantanamo Bay, and around the world. We are no better than the Chinese ourselves.

Chinese capitalism, its government dominance of the media, and its strong arm against those who challenge it isn’t too far a cry from our own corporate owned, commercial driven news media and election-rigged democracy whose strong arm will strike even those who don’t particularly threaten us. We have turned our greatest redeeming factor- our love of free democratic society- and imposed it on the unwilling in order to dominate them through globalization and conglomeration.

So no wonder our city and federal governments chose to deny the public the chance to see the actual torch. No wonder they wasted countless tax dollars to get us to hang out on the street and fight at each other fruitlessly for awhile. And no wonder the most you see on the TV is a reporter talking about how nice a day it is in San Francisco- 10-15 feet above and away from the crowds.

Just as we know we cannot believe what the Chinese government tells the world through their manipulation of the media of the event, we cannot believe what American media says about it either. They played along to help mask the true light of the event into a casual stroll along the streets that were unusually empty- due to the whole city being on the waterfront.

What we can rely on is that no one goes out on the streets of London, Paris, San Francisco or anywhere else to see that torch without cameras in their hands and internet on their phones.

The one redeeming event of the day was seeing a group of older, mostly Chinese, people in matching outfits doing tai chi to Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane”, an almost metaphor for the whole event– one big laugh for a joke that wasn’t even told.

Lately I have been hearing a lot of talk about Barack Obama. It comes in tidbits of conversation, mostly from the mouths of TV pundits and once-source news readers who just aren‘t sure if America is ready for “change”. This “change” has gained a new and tacky meaning, one that assumes we are all inherently stupid. Nobody seems to be sure whether or not this country is ready for a Black president. I have even heard people say to each other, as if the words out of their mouths were an accepted fact “he would be assassinated if he ever gets elected.”

We only believe this flawed logic because we hear it on TV and repeat it, it has no basis in reality. These primary elections should be evidence enough of the change we as a society have already undergone in the last ten years alone. When we only had one portal of information- the radio and then the TV, information was easily filtered and manipulated by our government through mainstream media. Today we can find anyone in the worlds take on any given situation, we can watch footage of U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on you tube.com, and view pictures of Iraqi casualties. A million news and recreational entertainment sources have ingrained themselves permanently and quickly in our everyday lives.

We carry at least one computer, a potential news source, at ALL times in the form of a cell phone. The public library in every city has free fast DSL. Whole regions are being set up with free public wi-fi.

These primaries have shown also that, with the potential information we can gather at any time, we can make more informed and educated opinions about what is going on. The talking heads have miscalculated throughout this primary season, naming early winners and pulling statistics out of their asses.

When it comes to Barack Obama, they said he didn’t stand a chance with the White majority. The actual numbers have proven that wrong also.

And how hard is it that in this modern age we can hardly evolve past our primitive beliefs, beliefs in an ordered society of intelligence based on gender, religion, skin color, or ethnicity.

Do WE really believe that we haven’t evolved enough to reasonably be able to think critically, and make decisions based on fact and character rather than dwelling on the social orders we shackled ourselves and each other with in the past?

In short, some of the older, white, Christian men we have elected in the past were corrupted and they wronged us- and some of them weren’t and they didn’t.

It’s not about whether or not America is ready for a Black person, a woman, or a Mormon president- it is about whether or not we are ready to think critically about things that actually matter.

If the pundits really want to know what to believe or think, they should know this: we aren’t ready for a change, we already have.

On September 11, 2001, I was a high school sophomore at a Catholic school on the Central Coast of California. Being 3000 miles away from ground zero, I probably did not take the situation with as much seriousness as I should have.

We loved 9/11, at first. We got out of all of our classes, and it was definitely more entertaining than September 10. A friend and I jokingly talked about a movie that would be made in the future - a love story- the woman in tower one and a man in tower two reaching out to each other and proclaiming their undying love as the towers go down. (Incidentally, Oliver Stone made that movie, sans the melodramatic love scene, a couple years later).

We shouldn’t have been laughing about the situation. Today her husband is in Baghdad, fighting for the U.S. Army. My generation faces a $9 trillion debt, mounting personal debts, no health care, and I don’t feel any safer, if anything I think we have simply proliferated terrorism.

Both Republicans and Democrats vying for the presidency have all admitted that the last 7 years in this country have been nothing short of a disaster.

During the recent Republican debates in Florida, the candidates were all given 30 seconds to answer the question of whether or not they believed the war in Iraq was worth the “blood and treasure it has cost us”. All of them, with the exception of Ron Paul, either skirted the question or gave an indirect answer about the popularity then and now for the war.

Guiliani stated, and was echoed by McCain and Romney, that although the American public is now against this war, they would not back down. It is about winning this war, not whether the people want to fight it anymore. Even when the polls change, they will stay the course.

The American public may have supported the war in 2003, largely in part because we were misinformed. As it turns out, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and so our opinion changed. As our elected representatives, theirs should have too.

Do they really think that is what we want to hear, “Sit back and trust us, because you are too ignorant to know what is good for you”?. We live in a democracy (kind of), and I could only hope if the majority of the American people wanted something, it would be our government’s duty to do it. As the government of a democracy, we sign their paychecks, they are our employees. Did we forget that these people work for us? Clearly, they have. We forget that, in the international game of chess, we are the pawns, playing the king well saves lives.

The reason all these filthy old men are allowed to play the “sit back and trust me” game is because we don’t vote.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the United States ranks 139 in voter turnout percentage, with an average of 48% of us turning out for elections since 1945. No wonder the leader of the free world never acts as such.

If we really want change, we need to prove it. The way we have been picking our president is like employing a business with employees we didn’t care to interview. This election should be about understanding our global position, because knowledge is what will prevent another 9/11 and a subsequent Iraq in the future.

Tonight at the Ace Bar in San Francisco (14th and Mission), I held a long and disorganized discussion about religion, politics, and other taboo topics of conversation with a Guinness-drinker who would only allow himself to be identified as “The Suppository of Knowledge”.

We began to discuss the tired topic of the Bush Administration.

I began by telling him my maybe far-fetched notion that George Bush and the events of the last 7 years in this country are no worse than anything that has happened in the past- the only difference is that through rapid advances in technology in the last decade, we now have all the power in the world to know everything that goes on, but no power to do anything about it. I continued by explaining that this is the dilemma of my unmotivated and over-entertained generation, and I do believe that is why we are more concerned about the meltdown of Britney Spears rather than the meltdown of our government.

No wonder we are all talking about “change”- it’s what naturally needs to come next for us to sustain our economic, social, environmental, political, and personal lives in the modern and more informed world.

Last week, in a visit to the Middle East, our country sold billions of dollars of weaponry to Saudi Arabia. Didn’t giving weapons to Middle Eastern countries with whom we have current strategic ties backfire on us a few times already? Aren’t we currently amounting another 3 trillion to the national debt fighting against our own weapons?

In an interview on “A Daily Show“ the Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria commented, “We want democracy in strategically irrelevant countries.”

This is true, and this corrupted foreign policy of push and pull where it is financially convenient is not working as well as when the wool was over the bulk of the world’s eyes. We can start change however, by admitting there is a problem worth changing.

The way we have operated in America since the end of World War II has been to maintain our newfound hegemonic position through a fascinating and uniquely American system of imperial-capitalism. We currently control much of the world through debt, occupation, and gifts. No one in the world would deny the power of this nation, and the majority would not disagree with the ideals of its revolutionary free democracy. But our system has failed and we have created a world that is impoverished, oppressed and hostile.

Last month Papua New Guinea summed it up quite well for us at the Bali Conferences; “You need to lead or get out of the way.”

Our foreign policy has made us wealthy and culturally relevant, but its major flaw was that the path taken was a dead end cycle of puppeteering and damage control, and it really is ok to say “we were wrong” and lead another way.

Well thank Hollywood for doing just that, it seems that our entertainers pull the weight where our politicians fail. It seems as if actors have become the only real relevant players in new media, and maybe that is a good thing.

Although it’s disappointing and embarrassing that we need Chuck Norris, Oprah, Jon Stewart, and Bill O’Reilly to entertain us enough into caring enough about politics and the goings on of our elected officials in a country that holds the value of freedom so highly.

If only more people could turn on the news and be informed about the true weight and global importance of a vote for change, past the campaign slogans and race wars and to the issues at hand.

There is nothing new about voters struggling to determine which candidate is the least evil dirt bag in the upcoming presidential election.

What is new is that this is the first election where so many people around the world have so much access to information. Essentially, everyone’s dirty laundry will be on global display this time. Everyone’s speeches are being posted in their entirety and picked apart by bloggers.

We will no longer be trying to determine which of our candidates puffed marijuana and who inhaled, we will know the truth—they all inhaled. They have all taken bribes, gifts, hired undocumented immigrants, dressed in drag or have slowly reintroduced theocracy to legislation.

We the younger generation, the students, the technologically savvy, need to take this election into our hands. We have a leg up on our parents and grandparents—we know how to use the Internet for anything we want.

For the first time in American electoral history, we have the power to expose everything about everyone. Not only have we created a way to get free movies and music, but we have created a new kind of governmental accountability.

We have a voice that we’ve never had before. We are submitting questions from the comfort of our homes to candidates through YouTube and seeing them answered in real time.

News wire sites report on candidates and their discussion boards have enabled debate and source-checking as never before, providing an unmatched forum for the competition of ideas.

Building on Wikipedia’s structure, the Web site Congresspedia allows citizens to share and debate information that would have had to filter through more commercial media in the past, giving them unprecedented power to expose corrupt officials and bring transparency to the government.

In his campaign for mayor of San Francisco, blogger Josh Wolf presented the idea of using the Internet as a virtual town hall for Americans to watch government in action.
We can use the same idea to create a virtual fish bowl for our federal government, if we choose.

Relying on our government to check and balance itself has failed to some extent. We now can choose to take responsibility for watching our government.

Along with accountability, we also have the ability to now voice our opinion on a national level. By these means, we can more clearly observe and direct the campaigns.
We choose the issues, and because candidates also have the power to watch us online, they are more likely to sway the way we want, or at least to discuss the issues we care the most about.

This can be a transition to mutual trust. The government can learn to respect the intelligence and passion of the American people by if they see us seizing this opportunity. It doesn’t have to be a war.

There is no such thing as painless growth, and the interim will likely spawn hostility on both sides—electorate and elected. If we concentrate on the idea that communication breeds trust and respect, we can emerge a stronger and more self-assured country.

We rely often on our actions abroad to promote global democracy; let us now teach the concept through our words at home.

Rapper Jay-Z’s new video, “Blue Magic,” features scenes of New York City, clubs, cars and stacks of euros. That’s right, euros—not dollars.

The dollar continues to drop and the euro continues to rise. So what exactly is Europe doing right and what is America doing wrong?

Among other things, the European Union (EU) has taken the forefront on climate change. Not only do they recognize it as a threat to the planet, but also to human health, food supply and most importantly—the economy. They have enacted directives and other legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cleaned up polluted waterways and put restrictions on pesticides and other deadly chemicals that can harm the land and food supply. The plans set timelines, most within the next 10 years, and almost all of them mention how tackling these problems will save them stacks of euros in healthcare costs, agriculture and energy.

Last week, EU Commission scientists released free software for cell phones that allows members of the European community to track their own daily “carbon footprint.” It is a way of letting the average European know exactly how their habits contribute to climate change. It also allows the EU to keep track of the region’s habits and compare them to standards set by the Kyoto Protocol in order to help devise correct and effective legislation to help Europe prevent global meltdown.

Here in America, our government has taken their own steps to prevent climate change—by extensively researching it to determine if it is actually a threat to us. Floods in the Pacific Northwest, Hurricane Katrina, wildfires in California, drought and nationwide extreme weather have cost us billions of dollars thus far. These natural disasters are not evidence enough of climate change, and its potential damage to our economy.

The clean up and reconstruction of these disasters are not the only costly concern. With all those toxins now in the air from perhaps the longest fire season in Southern California ever, more and more people will be at risk for acquiring respiratory illnesses from breathing in the smoke that has fused with the LA smog cloud. In the hurricane-ravaged south states, there is now a larger population of the unemployed and displaced—and that means more welfare costs for American taxpayers.

Earlier this week, Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, ratified the Kyoto Protocol within hours of being sworn in. The United States is now the only country involved that has not ratified it. Rudd has also been taking an active role in the United Nation’s Bali Conferences, which lays out a framework for newer and more active environmental guidelines that will come with Kyoto’s expiration in 2012.

Rudd won election in large part by putting the environment at the forefront of his campaign. When will our front-running candidates for the 2008 presidential election—Republican or Democrat—take a pragmatically urgent stance on climate change? Will any of them promise the American public that they too, will ratify the Kyoto Protocol? Why is no one running on a platform that puts the environment first—as it is fundamentally connected to welfare, healthcare, immigration and almost all the issues at the forefront of the campaign that afflict our struggling economy?

America’s after-the-fact response to climate change not only affects us at home, but those all over the world. If we do not push our elected politicians to take proactive leadership on climate change, not only do we place our dollars at greater risk, but we will be putting the rest of the world in jeopardy.

“This culture is so afraid of pleasure, of hedonism,” said Claire Burch, an 82-year-old filmmaker and author from Berkeley. She has been working to promote the legalization of marijuana for medical and recreational use through her documentary work.

Burch, along with other marijuana advocates and users, promotes marijuana as a natural and healthy alternative to costly and sometimes dangerous prescription medications.

“[Marijuana] is not going to turn your kids into bums who don’t do their homework,” Burch said.

Patients facing depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, chronic pain, and other ailments in California have chosen to defy orders by the federal government and use marijuana as an alternative to taking legal medications that are habit forming or have too many side effects. Despite federal laws prohibiting marijuana usage, medically or otherwise, some Bay Area patients and SF State students continue to use marijuana medically and recreationally.

“I’m old, but I am still here,” said Burch, who credits marijuana with not only helping her cope with pain but also improving her overall quality of life. She added that whether the drug is used medically or recreationally, the government’s war on drugs is inherently wrong.

“I have ran into a lot of people who could have used marijuana if it were legal,” she said.

Burch recently released a documentary titled, “The California Chronicles of Medical Marijuana,” which follows the work of her friends and other associations in California that have worked to defend medical patients and the rights they believe they deserve.

When asked if she has ever faced opposition from law enforcement for her work, she said that a police officer once said to her, “If you get mugged in a dark alley lady, don’t call us.”

In the opening scene of “Chronicles” is a speech about the federal war on drugs given by “Brownie Mary,” who gained notoriety in San Francisco in the 1980s for baking marijuana brownies and taking MUNI around the city to distribute them to AIDS patients. “The federal government be damned!” she yelled in the speech. “This war on marijuana is bullshit!”

California was the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for medical use. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that federal laws prohibiting the use of marijuana supersede state laws allowing it.

Under the Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Raich in June of 2005, the federal government ruled that California’s Proposition 215, which allowed the use of medical marijuana, was unconstitutional. The court referred to the constitution’s “commerce clause,” writing that the medical marijuana industry violates federal laws regulating the sale of drugs. Burch’s documentary addresses the federal raids that ensued after the ruling on growers and distributors in the Bay Area.

“The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has no representation in the constitution,” said Casey, an international relations major who declined to state his last name. He said that he has been smoking marijuana recreationally for seven years, and that he smokes marijuana on campus.

According to Sgt. Renee Wilson with SF State University Police, students who possess a medical marijuana card are still not allowed to use medical marijuana on campus.

“It’s ridiculous. The government should not have that much control over our lives,” Casey said. He admits, however, that smoking marijuana regularly can make him forgetful and unmotivated.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) the potent chemical in marijuana (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or “THC”) works in the brain by binding with natural receptors called “cannabinoid” receptors. NIDA states that the short-term effects of marijuana include distorted perception, difficulty thinking, problem solving, loss of coordination and increased heart rate. The long-term effects of marijuana are similar to the effects on the body and brain from other addictive drugs. Discontinuing use of marijuana has strong withdrawal symptoms.

Although Casey admits that smoking marijuana causes him to become unmotivated, he said he still feels it has healing qualities. Although he does not have a medical marijuana card, he uses it to help with nausea, headaches and hangovers.

“I’m very disappointed that of all college campuses in the country, SF State does not have a single drug policy reform student organization on campus,” said Raphael, a card-carrying patient, activist, and student who also declined to state his last name.

Raphael said that marijuana is essential to his health and well-being. He uses marijuana to combat glaucoma and anxiety. He was prescribed eye drops that he said were painful to use and had side effects he would rather avoid. For Raphael and other patients, the side effects of marijuana are insignificant and feel it is the clear natural alternative to their prescribed medications.

Rev. Randi Webster, who has been a marijuana patient since 1980, has arthritis, cardiovascular disease and is missing cartilage in her knees. She says that her doctors had prescribed her codeine to cope with the pain, which spiraled into a serious addiction.

“I was jones’n it,” she said. She began taking diet pills to balance the effects of the codeine, furthering her addiction. “I was over-the-counter speedballing,” she said. Now Webster only uses cannabis to treat her problems and works with the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) to help educate and reform the public on medical marijuana.

According to Joe Connolly, the Treasurer of Americans for Safe Access (AFSA) in San Francisco, Californians continue to defy federal law openly and through legislation to uphold not only their personal views on the drug but also the state’s stance on it.

“We have here what is called the ‘lowest priority law,’” he said. “That means if a cop sees a guy using hard drugs sitting next to a guy smoking weed, he will arrest the drug user…and to the guy smoking weed, he’ll say ‘that sure smells good’.”

As the water supply dries up in Georgia, the snow falls early in the Rockies, and California gets burned up in a succession of wildfires the Bush Administration continues to pretend that the clear and present danger of climate change is unfounded and nonexistent. Meanwhile, I am still trying to figure out what was so clear and present about the Iraq threat that elicited such quick and not-so-efficient reaction.

I would like to see some of the legislative enthusiasm that didn’t hesitate to throw us into war do something useful for once, like save the whole world.

Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize is exciting, if for nothing more than the immediate reaction it caused. Within days I noticed a swift change in national news: a focus on “green” campaigning. From TV ads to magazine articles, the rest of America is starting to get it.

It has become the duty of the people, and our celebrity leaders, to respond where our government does not. Even Sean Penn beat the feds to Katrina.

As much as we would like to preserve the post-WWII capitalist paradise we have created ourselves–the world of Wal-Marts, bulldozers, McDonald’s, SUV’s, and overzealous meat consumption–we simply cannot. The only thing “we the people” seem to be unable to do is convince our elected officials to step in.

Amidst the green flurry infesting the masses, advertisers are getting more creative to maintain profits on some of their most wasteful products.

Jack in the Box has billboards off of Interstate 80 that read “Vegetariano? Lastima!” (“Vegetarian? What a pity!”) next to a picture of a burger topped with about ten layers of meat. Jack in the Box is targeting low-income Mexican immigrants and it is despicable.

The dairy and meat industry in the United States not only pumps cows full of harmful antibiotics and hormones (which may be connected to the bevy of gastroenterological conditions unique to first-world countries) but they are one of the worst contributors to global warming. Our insatiable and unnaturally frequent appetite for blood is no longer sustainable in our world.

Meanwhile, Atlanta, another Southern low-income metro area with a large black population, is drying up. Lake Lanier, the water supply for most of northern Georgia, is at dangerously low levels. The US Army Corps of Engineers have been controlling the flows of the Chattahoochee and other rivers feeding the lake to supply the US Army’s West Point, in Mississippi. As the drought gets worse for the Atlanta area, the Army still isn’t reducing the amount of water they are taking out of Georgia.

The people of Atlanta are going to fall to the wayside as our administration continues to wait for factual evidence on global warming.

The Nobel Laureates are trying to send us a message, and they are doing it the only way we Americans will understand it. Acknowledging Al Gore as an important global figure forces Americans into acknowledging global warming as a clear and present danger. The next step is convincing our government of the same.

If individuals really step it up to do their part, including educating ourselves to our government’s actions, we will find that we do have the power to affect global change.

When America voted in a Democratic Congress in the mid-term elections, a sigh of relief could be heard all over the world. Finally, Americans are taking the right step to understand our global position.

Sadly, our so-called Democrat Congress has been a major disappointment. We elected these legislators under the assumption that they would do all they could to overcome the mistakes of the failing Bush Administration.

So far, they still haven’t approved a timeline for withdrawal in Iraq, they haven’t passed legislation to lower America’s carbon emissions, they haven’t fixed our healthcare, they aren’t even able to uphold our supposed separation of church and state.

So what have they been doing? They have been working diligently to bring to light the human rights violations of a current ally for past transgressions.

Lately Congress has been pushing to approve a resolution recognizing the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 by the Turks of the dying Ottoman Empire.

Genocide is one of the most demented manifestations of human society. Recognizing this genocide would be an overdue validation for Armenians, but it’s hypocritical for our government to spend its time recognizing a 90-year-old genocide across the world when we haven’t even recognized our own country’s genocide of the Native American people or black enslavement.

Even President Bush is making sense on this issue. Wednesday morning, Bush scolded Congress harshly, saying, “One thing the Congress should not be doing is sorting out the history of the Ottoman Empire… Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing an important democratic ally in the Muslim World.”

Bush is right: our Congress does have more important work to do, like getting us out of one of the most financially draining military entanglements in American history. Our activity in the Middle East is a mounting blow for our economy.

Turkey, which has been petitioning to become a member of the European Union (EU), could be hindered in its application process by a resolution recognizing this genocide, the perpetrators of which are long dead. The European Union has strict standards as far as its member states and human rights violations.

We have no reason to further complicate our relations in the Middle East, and creating tension with Turkey is just plain stupid.

It is clear that our Democratic congress was elected on the mere principal that they weren’t Republican, but they are proving to be inefficient. The Democrats we elected into Congress need to step up their game and show us they are more than just “not Republican,” they need to do what we elected them to do: be a voice of the people in a democracy.