Letters to the Editor 12-26-13

Greenest council
Editor: The just-released Sonoma County Conservation Action (SCCA) Report Card shows that Sebastopol has elected the greenest City Council in the County. Note that the Council is not green in the sense of political party names, but due to its initiatives and its votes. Every Council member has shown growth in environmental leadership and votes, and Sarah Gurney is the Councilmember who SCCA feels has provided the strongest leadership in 2013.
Sebastopol has elected this Council due to the desire of residents to keep the town small, echoing the aspirations of many in Sonoma and Healdsburg also. The difference is that Sebastopol’s citizenry includes many who are dedicated to the cause and willing to spend time on spreading information about development and design issues to residents who don’t attend Planning or Council meetings, and who may get only partial or slanted information from commercial publications.
In particular, many Sebastopol residents are willing to walk door to door, and campaign for green candidates. This is why the votes fell as they did in 2010, electing perhaps Sebastopol’s greenest ever City Council.
Jane Nielson
Sebastopol
What is ‘community’?
Editor: What is “community?” The definition given by the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2013, says it is “a unified body of individuals, the people with common interests living in a particular area,” “society at large,” “joint ownership or participation,” “common character,” “social activity,” “a social state or condition.” So now we know what a community is defined as.
Yet where is there any community in this poor section of Santa Rosa called Roseland? Why has it not been incorporated into the city of Santa Rosa even though it lies closer to downtown than many other more affluent sections? Bennett Valley or Mark West Springs, for example?
I don’t think Sonoma County’s leaders, manifested as they are as members of the Board of Supervisors or the Santa Rosa City Council, know or care about Roseland or community. What good will setting up a so-called “task force” do? Despite near-daily public marches by mostly Latino youth, bolstered by a Berkeley organization called By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) after the killing of a youth who was mistaken for a terrorist by a Sheriff’s Department deputy on Oct. 22, we’re experiencing additional police repression: two adult protesters arrested and quickly charged. Each face serving time in the local jail, probably worse. At the least a police record to haunt them. It should be said that one of the two suspects has a prior criminal record.
One of the world’s greatest psychiatrists, Carl Jung, wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Sonoma County’s establishment is headed in the opposite direction. They keep trying to imagine their way out of what clearly is a broad community crisis that has been long in coming. It’s a nearly complete loss in public confidence which progressively has worsened over the past 10 years. It wasn’t just happenstance, as many are still trying to maintain, that the 13-year-old Latino young man was killed in Roseland, one of the poorest areas or communities in California.
Subconsciously Deputy Gelhaus’s eight shots, seven of which hit the boy, came as a result of long-held prejudices by white, former military policemen. The shots tore through a defenseless child’s body coming from less than 40 feet away. As young Lopez turned his body, trying to locate the source of a shout, down he went. Dying.
Still in the forefront of Sonoma County’s official response is prejudice against Latinos. Time won’t heal the wound in the hearts of members of the Lopez family or anyone else. A civil settlement may partially relieve the justifiable tensions in this situation, but never bring Andy back to life. Regardless of how the courts decide, the impact of this tragedy will remain with us for years to come. For the mother and father it will never go away.
Where can we look for consciousness in the darkness? A Roseland park named “The Andy Lopez Park” might help some. A police review board too. We can only hope and pray, as we celebrate the holidays, that Roseland shall soon be within Santa Rosa.
Frank Baumgardner
Santa Rosa