When I left you I was but the learner

Like many of my fellow alumni, I was disappointed to learn that Rick Santorum was making a campaign stop at my high school. Even worse than giving that Christian sharia law advocate a recognized platform, though, was how school teachers and administrators meddled with the students being able to share their concerns directly with the candidate.

While some students got to ask Santorum some "tough questions" -- just barely -- others felt that Santorum tried to dodge real answers. School officials admitted filtering out certain questions from the ones that students submitted to ask. Per the Daily Herald:

Questions were screened by both school officials and Santorum’s advisers, said English department head Charles Venegoni. Ones that asked about social issues such as gay rights or religion were rejected.

Below is my letter written to a local newspaper criticizing the excessive oversight. I may have connived to get their attention with some fulsome notes up top. Gotta know your audience ;)

My sly reference to Nirvana's Serve the Servants ("self-appointed judges judge / more than they have sold") is intact, something I imagined in my ancient wisdom "the kids" would appreciate. Hi kids! My reference to my high school era 'zine, Another Point of View -- which no one but a tiny handful of friends would have noticed -- is also there.

APoV may or may not have been printed on photocopy paper liberated from Hersey storeroom shelves, by the way. Which reminds me, when a controversial letter I wrote as a student to the school newspaper, The Correspondent, was published before administrators could intervene, I briefly earned the nickname The Hersey Anarchist.

Some things never change. Here's my latest letter (headlined by the newspaper):

Hersey Sets Bad Example At Candidate Event

Editor, Journal: Thanks for reporting on Rick Santorum’s visit to Hersey High School in Arlington Hts. with some critical insight and greater detail than I found in other local newspapers’ coverage.

The notion that a school would filter questions from students to a political candidate sends a pathetic message to young people. In a land where free speech is a unique founding principle, to communicate to children that their thoughts and words must be moderated by self-appointed judges, undercuts the “inalienable” rights that Americans have always been taught make us who we are.

I applaud you for speaking with Santorum’s opponents outside the event and for indicating that not all citizens, in Chicago’s suburbs as elsewhere, are content to watch the nation’s most essential principles of liberty be trampled ignorant social overseers.

As a graduate of Hersey High and a professional journalist -- the same trade that my school’s namesake, John Hersey, plied -- I am disappointed that my alma mater chose to muddle its mission of teaching students how to think critically and participate in the greater society that the school is a microcosm of.

A lot has changed at Hersey in the past couple decades. The ideas that bullied students are now told “it gets better” and that openly gay youths be unafraid to reveal who they are, is lightyears from the turn-the-other-way attitude that I and many other students endured for many uncomfortable years at Hersey. Yet the school itself seems to be bullying its students in a more insidious way: by kowtowing to a dubious guest whose visit was supposedly to cast light on his beliefs, effectively silencing another point of view.

To coddle a candidate instead of putting him to the true test of answering to his fellow citizens directly is a foolhardy and cowardly capitulation to social modesty and philosophic meekness. Hersey administrators and faculty should be asking themselves if they fell short of a liberal arts education’s mission: to foster intellectual enlightenment and build character, not facilitate status quo complacency and image conscious hypocrisy.

Todd R. Brown, Hersey Class of '88

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And wouldn't you know. The day after Santorum's visit, a spate of homophobic graffiti occurred around Arlington Heights, Ill., where the school is. Sometimes people wonder if I'm gay since I identify with their rights struggle. Typically my silent answer to the unasked question is none of your business. But basically, I abhor bigotry, and these days as a former underdog, I fight the power for the people.

By the way, who woulda thunk, there's another John Hersey out there. And one more trivia note: Hollywood came to town and shot some of the new A Nightmare on Elm Street at Hersey. Talk about a nightmare ... "you're in high school again."

Flashback: The Black Panther Party, then and now

In light of the tragic Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, I think this article I wrote on Black Panthers' cofounder Bobby Seale a few years back is worth a rerun. Empowerment to the people ...

Panthers' Seale: 'It was about a principle,' not being 'macho'

Group's co-founder, now 70, joins panel discussion at Ohlone College

By Todd R. Brown, Staff Writer.

Thursday, May 10, 2007—Reprinted from The Argus.

Bobby Seale, co-founder of Oakland's Black Panthers, discusses the social struggle of the '60s on Wednesday at Ohlone College. (Anda Chu - Staff).

FREMONT—Forty years ago, a group of armed Black Panthers entered the state Assembly chamber to protest a gun control bill that Panther founder Bobby Seale said would keep blacks "disarmed and helpless."

It was a shocking move for the upstart activists, clearly signaling that the militant civil rights campaign of Malcolm X would not die with its recently murdered leader.

The Panthers inspired leagues of other rebels, including the White Panthers in Michigan and senior advocates dubbed Gray Panthers. The Black Panthers weren't posturing for posterity when they confronted their enemies in the establishment, Seale said. They were on a mission.

"It was organized. It was disciplined. We knew our history. It wasn't macho, it was about a principle," said Seale, who ignited the group with Huey Newton in 1966 in Oakland. "Power to the people."

Seale appeared Wednesday at Ohlone College for a panel discussion titled "Pioneers of the Civil Rights Era," moderated by Chicano studies professor Mark Salinas.

The half-dozen veterans of the Age of Aquarius told a packed house what it meant to them to take part in a collective grass-roots movement.

"We just thought we were going to change the world right away," said Maria Ramirez, an 

Ohlone counselor and founding member of the Chicano Student Union at Chabot College in Hayward.

As time went on, she said, the members of the1960s generation realized, or perhaps rationalized, they were part of a larger continuum.

"We're part of 500 years of resistance," she told the diverse students gathered in the Jackson Theatre. "You are living history."

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton, who recounted the Panthers' 1967 confrontation in Sacramento in a May 3 article, noted that "the Panthers looked scary, but really weren't."

Certainly Seale cuts a more genteel image at 70 than he does in black-and-white photos showing a leather-jacketed, beret-clad, pistol-packing firebrand.

On Wednesday, he wore a Berkeley YMCA cap, a tan button-down shirt, and khakis supported by suspenders and a belt, and carried a mirthful look on his face.

The Texas native, whose family moved to the West at the end of World War II, shared his own activist awakening in 1962 when he worked as an engineer on the Gemini missile program in San Leandro and took classes at Merritt College in Oakland.

He checked out a street rally where a preacher described visions of the kings of western Africa, a revelation for Seale.

"Here I am getting A's in mathematics, and I didn't know nothing about this history," he said, noting that he picked up little about black history at Berkeley High School, except that "slaves sat on a stoop and played the banjo."

Another seminal influence was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s proposed boycott of companies that would not hire blacks, including bread companies.

"We want Wonder Bread to wonder where the money went," Seale recalled King saying.

A trio of Logan High School students who sat in the first row of the 400-capacity room seemed particularly receptive to Seale's wisdom.

"This is a pivotal point in my life," said David Collins, 17, a junior at the Union City school. "I get to see a glimpse of the magnificence that was once the Black Panthers."

Abel Shifferaw, 16, another junior, said he had read extensively about the Panthers, whom the FBI accused of being communist for hosting a free breakfast program for Oakland schoolchildren. Shifferaw was even inspired to help found a socialist group at Logan, the People's Vanguard Party for Social Defense.

"My mom doesn't like it too much," he said, wearing a goatee, a slight Afro and thick-framed glasses a la Malcolm X. "She's from Ethiopia. She'd rather I'd become a doctor or something."

Seale's wife, Leslie Johnson-Seale, 58—they met when she joined the Panthers in 1969—manned a table outside the theater with DVDs and books for sale such as "The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered)."

She said the couple had been living mostly in Philadelphia, where she is from, for the past 25 years or so, but started staying part of the year in Oakland at Seale's family home around 2000.

Today, she said, Seale works with the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, which provides an artistic outlet for at-risk youths, and Urban Releaf, an East Bay tree-planting group.

She said she has few regrets from her Panther days, when she lived communally with other young people who felt driven to change the world.

"When it was over, it kind of left us confused," she said. "Because it was a way of life."

Seale said he wouldn't change his past, although he lamented the violent end for some of his fellow Panthers, such as Fred Hampton, whom police in Chicago shot dead in 1969.

"I wish I could change the situation for some of my friends who were killed," he said.

Reflecting on the social progress so many of his generation, of all colors, fought for, Seale concluded: "First of all, you're human. You're part of the greater humanity of the whole Earth—your thinking, human mind."

Here is the same Ohlone College archived article.

An entertaining dramatization of the Black Panthers' story is 1995's Panther by Mario and Melvin Van Peebles.

 

Microfarming takes tenuous hold in the Central Valley

My article on Central Valley small-scale farming versus industrial agriculture is up on HealthyCal.org, a nonprofit, public policy reporting website. Here's an excerpt; I also shot photos for the piece, which are running in March at the top of the main site.

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Despite increasing demand, small farms face disadvantage

By Todd R. Brown

Rancher Maria Abuelas of Madera County talks grass-fed beef with
a shopper at a Fresno farmers market. Photo by Todd R. Brown.

Maria Abuelas is off to a modest start as a rancher in the Sierra foothills, where she keeps a herd of about 20 grass-fed cattle on 200 acres.

“That’s my passion these days,” she said with a gleam in her eye, “growing good grass.” For ranchers in her field, alfalfa is their herd’s prime indulgence.

For generations, most American meat eaters have supped on grain-fed beef, which some of today’s connoisseurs say lacks taste and nutrition compared with the grass-fed variety.

Consumers are more and more concerned with such food production matters as supporting sustainable farming, buying from local growers and avoiding genetically modified fare. That trend encourages small-scale producers like Abuelas, who are connecting with customers alarmed by bioengineered foods making their way to the table and who pine for a more time-honored approach to their sustenance.

Yet for the most part, food distribution remains dominated by quantity-driven corporations, and some small farmers in the Central Valley struggle with a food system controlled by a few distributors and dominated by larger-scale producers who are jumping on the green bandwagon for a piece of the $30 billion industry.

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Read the full story on HealthyCal.org. They do good work, including recent stories on child abduction relating to the Steven Stayner tragedy and nuclear power in California.