On Tuesday, June 30 I attended my second Oakland City Council meeting concerning budgetary cutbacks to the library system in Oakland. Again I held up Patrick’s sign, “Save The Libraries,” and again with my usual ambivalence about public speaking: it’s scary/it’s important/stretch the parameters of comfort (work those muscles and make them stronger), I marched up to the podium.
Earlier in the day I had sat comfortably enough in the office of my Dentist Dr. Thuy Bui of Alameda, whom I trust and recommend, whole-heartedly. As I had my teeth cleaned, I concocted this little story, a composite of sorts…
The other day as I returned from my morning bicycle ride around the lake, I came across my elderly neighbor, Dot, doing a bit of gardening, having earlier hobbled home from her morning walk to the Lakeside Library. Amazingly, dot who is eighty-seven years old makes this daily pilgrimage, she worships at the alter of books and learning, this plus the walk is what has kept her so young and spry, both physically and intellectually. She greeted me with an unusually crabby (for her), “Can you believe the City of Oakland allows these climate change deniers to run noisy gasoline-powered leaf-blowers and water-blasters as a matter of course, any time for any excuse? Don’t they know there is a draught happening? Global warming? What about my asthma and that of the kids in the neighborhood, don’t they know that all those leaf-blowers do is raise all the dust? Do they care if the water-blasters make me deaf or crazy, or if they give me a heart attack? No, I guess they don’t care about me, but for them to recklessly allow all those greenhouse gasses to destroy our planet for no reason is unforgivable!”
I tried in my usual calming tones of acknowledgement to assure Dot that she was heard, but I had to ask her, in some puzzlement, “I follow you, I agree with you, Dot, but why did you call those who use the leaf-blowers and the water-blasters ‘climate change deniers?’ She amazed me by telling me that when she goes to the library she not only reads the likes of Bill Mckibbon, Paul Erlich, and Jeff Rubin to name a few, but she takes their messages to heart. She told me she fails to understand how anyone using those aforementioned gasoline-powered implements could possibly not be in total darkness, therefore denial of the peril to our entire civilization and all species, our earth, waters and atmosphere, if they were willing to use them.
Then Dot floored me by telling me that even though she has no computer, she regularly visits the websites of various environmental groups at the library’s free computers, to sign their petitions, email her representatives, so that she can feel she is contributing her part to the solution to climate change.
I am in continuous and growing awe of Dot, and I feel more than ever because of her, inspired to fight to save our libraries.
I think I bombed this time in my speech to Oakland City Council because the one minute or so that they gave me just wasn’t long enough. It is up to me to find a way to create the pithiest little sound-bite koans in the future. I believe I shall for the moment persevere.
~Chandra Garsson
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