Veterans for Peace Santa Barbara

Harbor groups and spectator bird

landerson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:11:25 +0000

Hi Friends,

I am still attending the Fellowship Hall meeting at Marina Pacifica. Every group has things to like and other things that challenge you. This fellowship hall has a child care room encased in glass but nearly soundproof. You can watch your kids while they watch sesame street. Although the fellowship hall morning meeting is often a hundred people, everyone introduces themselves before they start sharing. I’m kind of a “spectator bird” at the big meetings because everyone is in lively conversations and I don’t know anyone….so I watch for newcomers and try to engage them. On Saturday, the busiest day, I saw several across the room that came early and noticed that all the seats had markers on them and left before I could cross the crowded room. When the meeting started, one man picked up about a dozen markers at empty chairs and put them in his pocket. He had saved chairs for people who did not even make it. What really happened is that he denied newcomers that came early a place, hoping that he could impress his friends, and then when they did not come he had saved chairs for people who came late. Found a real good Men’s meeting there and have begun attending alanon there. My sons are showing symptoms and I was showing codependent symptoms (I’d fill the fridge with “healthy stuff” so that there was no room for beer).

Fellowship hall on State St. in Santa Barbara was my first homegroup some thirty one years ago. I’ve attended harbor groups all along the way on this cruise. When I sailed in from Santa Cruz Island, Channel Islands Harbor assigned me a slip at Peninsula Park and my boat sat forty feet from the Peninsula Park group. In Marina Del Rey I found the Better Way to Start Your Day group a hundred feet from my boat in the building where they assign guest slips at Chace Burton Park. I have two home groups in Santa Barbara, Start Your Day Right, the original harbor morning meeting, and the Harbor group, the current one.

Jean and I started the original harbor morning meeting shortly after her birthday twenty years ago. I had anticipated celebrating the 20th with Jean as the featured Founder and speaker….I thought it a good idea to get her to stay alive until then. The way it worked was that for the original meeting 20 years ago, I had lost job with the postal service after almost twelve years of carrying mail and had to move out of my house onto my boat, so was living in the harbor. Jean and I both disliked the mood at the 6:45am alano club meeting and we had been both meditating together and studying books. When we decided to start the meeting in the harbor, I contacted Harry Davis, a harbor institution and the guy that managed the little shack at the entrance of the harbor. He let us use the room and we met, sometimes only Jean and I until Alan P. noticed us….he was kiosk sentry until 7am every morning and made good coffee in the kiosk. He began coming and bringing coffee and Jean brought donuts. Kevin was the fourth regular and after a few months when it was in the meeting guide, others came. Blackie was one from the first year I think. It moved first to the Navy Reserve Building when the shed burned down and then to the Veterans Memorial Building when the Navy gave the building to the city. The city promised us a room in the (now) Maritime Museum area….Gardiner and I both attended city council and got the committment….but they broke their word!

What is now the Harbor Group did not start until a Pacific Group powerhouse, Susan, took the Start Your Day Right group by storm. She retyped the format without asking the group and listed it as a Pacific Group meeting…and caused a resentment. It was Jean’s idea to move back to the harbor and she asked me to go to harbor management about it. I went back to Harry Davis and he found us a small room near where the shack had been…the little community room behind the Breakwater restaurant. It soon proved too small and we ended up with an agreement to use the harbor classroom unless waterfront business needed it. That is still the agreement.

Best wishes, Lane

For Today –

Patience, tolerance, understanding and love are the watchwords.

– Alcoholics Anonymous, page 118

***********************************************************************************

Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and
wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us
what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.

– Lydia M. Child

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As the day goes by, let me rejoice in the differences of others,
and remember that harmony lives in me, not through
agreement from others.

– Help for Helpers

Huntington Beach AW

landerson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:39:49 +0000

Hi Friends,

I made it to Arlington West Huntington Beach on Sunday, March 7th, and stayed with them for the day. They have their VFP business meeting midday when they set up AWHB so I attended that as well. Like many chapters they have a negative cash flow and donations down but have to pay for storage of crosses etc. They have six hundred crosses and transport them in the back of a small pick up….reminded me of the first months when we transported ours in my Chevy Luv.

Farmlab in Los Angeles will feature Chapter 54 member Paul K Chappell at a June 25th noon Salon at their place on the river in LA. Please try to get a carpool going for that! If you come you can get out before the traffic gets nasty or I can try to find you overnight so that you can go home on Saturday. www.FarmLab.org

I’m still in Alamitos Bay enjoying the wet life.

Best wishes, Lane

Vets 2 Vets, Farmlab and 50 yrs

landerson — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:54:37 +0000

While exploring the Los Angeles area from my boat, I have attended many interesting projects for veterans and transorming our society. Few have been more impressive than Farmlab

http://www.farmlab.org/

(check out Vet 2 Vet this Friday at Noon!, Strawberry Flag and other projects)

Wes Jackson’s pitch at Farmlab focused on perennial food and the 50 year plan: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/05-5

The plan has been taken to the Obama administration:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072100645.html

Jackson pointed out that most of the food people eat is grains, still imported long distances, even when we grow other produce locally….and most of the damage to soils, water and air caused by agriculture is caused by growing annual grain.

Subsidies in the form of our tax dollars are used for destruction, not just in wars but in the destruction of our soil, water and air and in subsidies for motor vehicles http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-free-parking29-2010jan29,0,211620.story

In solidarity, Lane Anderson

ps, Jackson referred continually to his friend and ally Wendell Berry

excerpted:

“As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions

of your mind, lose it.

Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. “

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.

Want more of everything made.

Be afraid to know you neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery any more.

Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something they will call you.

When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.

Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace the flag.

Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

Give you approval to all you cannot understand.

Praise ignorance,

for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium.

Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion–put your ear close,

and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap for power,

please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap.

Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions

of your mind, lose it.

Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go.

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Copyright Wendell Berry

Alamitos Bay Routine

landerson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:07:15 +0000

Alamitos Bay is between Long Beach and Seal Beach on the San Gabriel River. It is my favorite guest harbor so far. From my boat Pelamis, I attend the Marina Pacifica Fellowship Hall AA meeting every morning at 7am and then after some boat chores I kayak across the bay to the San Gabriel River passing through flocks of surf scoters with their fake faces on their beaks. Grebes and cormorants watch my approach and then dive gracefully only to reappear a hundred feet away. I leave my kayak by the harbor master’s office and walk across the bridge over the San Gabriel to the Seal Beach library, which usually opens at ten. After I get my hour or so on the computers and look up birds in the stacks, I return to my kayak and continue around Naples Island to the Bayshore Library at Second Street. There I usually finish my online work for the day and then, if I have the energy, I continue down the Cerritos Channel to the wetlands along the San Gabriel River, which can be accessed by kayak but not by boat. Once inside the boom and down the side channels, you feel as if you are in the wild, with banks crowded with waders, egrets and herons.

This is my routine when I have no business in Los Angeles, Santa Monica or Long Beach. It happens tomorrow, Friday the 26th, Wes Jackson is speaking at Farmlab in downtown LA. The journey on the metro system will take part of the day but I will take a book by Jackson with me.

My plans now are to stay at Alamitos Bay until after the MFSO install the Arlington West Huntington Beach display on the first Sunday. At that time I will begin paying by the day and leave on the first good wind to Santa Catalina Island.

Best wishes, Lane

“Will War Ever End?” Fury and rage, VAMC

landerson — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:31:06 +0000

I have read Captain Paul Chappell’s book “Will War Ever End” and enjoyed it greatly.

I did not realize that Gandhi and Socrates were war veterans.

His distinction between fury and rage struck me. When I struck out at the nut that hit Phil and threw the display at Tom I was acting out of fury turned to rage. Halting fury at its constructive stage, that of acting out of concern for our fellows, and short of rage is the thing to learn!

I just learned today an important opportunity for Millenium Veterans!

http://www.mobilize.org/index.php?tray=topic&cid=3IS18&tid=3IStop7

(thanks to Annenberg Foundation for this info)

Please forward to all returned vets you know of the millenium generation. It is beginning of April but ideas to win $25,000 and put your idea forth need to go in by end of this month!

Check out the whole website www.mobilize.org

Other ideas for the young vets or older ones who want to provide housing for homeless veterans:

Check out Community Partners classes on non profits.

Go to the VA page on Homeless Veterans Grants and Per Diem

Check out the Foundation Directory Professional Tutorial, available at a library near you.

We were asked at Chapter 54 to take a position on a reported land grab at the VAMC WLA and I decided to investigate.

After many visits, meetings and covert recon missions at VAMC WLA, I am ready to make a report to you. Remember that despite my efforts to “get the facts”, this should be treated as one man’s investigation, albeit one that involved many hours and many sources.

A long term use plan will soon be developed for the property and I have been assured that veterans organizations will be invited to have input. I’ll keep you posted.

The Veterans Park Conservancy is no land grab, in fact the lease is carefully crafted to ensure that the VA has complete flexibility with the 16 acres in twenty years. They can either take ownership of the property with all the improvements or convert it into housing as they wish. The same is true of the Brentwood school East Campus, the VA will get the sports facilities and swimming pools at the end of the lease. The VA is already trying to cut a deal to use the pool and facilities on off hours even while it is leased. The difference in the two leases though, is that the Veterans Park will be open to the veterans, will be clearly labeled a veterans park, will have open gates on the VAMC WLA side and possibly locked gates many hours on the San Vicente side and will be a real asset for the thousands of veterans living on campus (it will be very close to the domiciliiary and to New Directions). Because it is a school, the Brentwood lease is restricted.

The land grabs were the Federal Building on Wilshire, the US Army Reserve Center, the National Guard Center, the US Post Office, the I-405 and Wilshire Blvd seizures and the cemetary. These were all lost and were violations of the Bandini-Baker gift of land. If veterans are protesting they should be protesting that and asking that the land be returned. Stacked cemetary is planned for the parking lot by the Jackie Robinson field…maybe protest that but its only a parking lot after all.

The VA assured me that no more property will be lost and that what they are doing is serving veterans well. There are at least four large buildings that need rehabilitating (205, 208, 209 and 158), one may face demolition (bldg 156, a nice one). There is a lot of vacant land that can be used to build on if that gets done before the leases are finished. There is more land and buildings than is likely to be needed in the next twenty years.

Because Obama promised 3.2 billion dollars for homeless veterans, the VA is holding the buildings with the hope of opening them as solid VA facilities instead of partnering. Still, there is a lot of need for partners. I made the point of how superior the VAMC Menlo Park/Palo Alto is…the clinicians consider it the best PTSD center in the country. Mr. Tillman agreed on the wisdom of trying to make the vacant buildings VA run. We have to wait and see how much money there is for LA!

In solidarity, Lane Anderson

Proud Lifetime Member of VFP Chapter 54

Adjutant, DAV Chapter 37

Lifetime Member of VFW Post 1649

VA Health Care and US

landerson — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:17:37 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time recently at the VAMC WLA, the largest veterans facility in the country. I’m both studying the facility and dealing with my own arthritis, high blood pressure and other advanced age symptoms. In the case of my own symptoms, many have minimized due to my loss of almost thirty pounds in the last six months (my doctor told me in September that I was overweight). My knee pain and blood pressure is down and even my prostate seems improved. Which brings me to an important observation relevant to all of us who use the VA health care system, and, indeed to everyone. The VA is overwhelmed with veterans like I was, overweight and neglecting their health. My weight was aggravating my arthritis and causing me to take so much NSAIDs that my blood pressure was high and I had to take more drugs for it and GI distress from the NSAIDs. I cannot explain why my prostate gives me less problem now but think it associated. Note that being overweight was causing me to take three drugs with all their side affects. How can we older veterans say we want the returning vets to get the care they deserve when we neglect our health and overwhelm the system with our own care? If we would just take some responsibility for our own health and keep our weight down, it would do more to take pressure of the VA health care system than all the complaining and protesting would. This, of course, also applies to the larger health care system…if everyone stayed as fit as Barack Obama and George W. Bush, we would not have the health care problems we have. (see, I’m bi partisan too)

Housing homeless vets with jobs?

landerson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:09:19 +0000

I’ve been visiting VAMC WLA several times a week to learn more about what goes on there.

Archis Acres founder and Iraq vet Colin Archipley, the VFP LA President and I met with Assets Management Director Ralph Tillman on Friday but there was only time for Archis Acres to present their program. I am meeting with Tillman next week. I would really like young vets with me….Colin Archipley got a good reception.
The meeting last week only covered Archis Acres, but Tillman was very receptive, I thought. We learned about the process of applying for use of VAMC WLA property. Young vets can learn to do this via the VA’s grant and per diem page and with foundation grants. They also can earn a living doing it.

This next meeting I will ask him the hard questions about Veterans Park Conservancy, Brentwood and Westwood intentions etc. So far the only land grab that has happened is by the national guard, army reserve, us post office, cemetary and the highways. Probably we should question the giving away of the property to the army reserve, california national guard and post office? The highway took the property under imminent domain I guess. The original gift was 600 acres, not 388. The cemetary will never heal any vets.
There is a lot going on on campus with California Vets Home under construction and 3.2 billion dollars promised for homeless vets.

They have put out a RFP (request for proposal) for one of the vacant buildings adjacent to Strawberry Flag twice, and both times the bidder backed out because the cost of bringing the building up to code for residency was too high for the committment that the VA would make (McCormick Baron Salazar once and Commongrounds once). The Salvation Army is housing nearly three hundred homeless vets in its facilities and New Directions has about three hundred. Hundreds more are at the domiciliary and more in other buildings that are confidential. Metabolic Studios is using some space and the land between the buildings for Strawberry Flag and productions and just got another six month lease. The funder of New Directions, Metabolic Studios, Strawberry Flag and Veterans Park Conservancy is Annenberg Foundation.

I will be meeting with Tillman this week and hope to meet with someone from Annenberg about assurances re VPC next week.

Best wishes, Lane

LONG BEACH natural history

landerson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:02:31 +0000

Two rivers, the Los Angeles and the San Gabriel hold Long Beach between them. It is probably why the worst flooding was in Long Beach during the rains. The two rivers come from different directions and mountain ranges and converge just a couple miles apart, the LA River next to my marina and the other next to Alamitos marina. Marinas usually are created from wetlands.

Howard Zinn and Honking For Peace

landerson — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:10:17 +0000

Dear Friends,

Was Zinn talking about honking for peace with this?

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Historian Howard Zinn

I think he was telling us the same thing that Gandhi did when he said we should be the change we wanted to see.

Michael Pollan refers to the idea as voting with our fork when he speaks about improving our food system. We vote on war, climate change and corporate dominance many times a day. When we drive our car instead of walking, bicycling or riding mass transit, we vote for war and climate chaos. At Arlington West Santa Monica last Sunday volunteers came to get Disneyland tickets but also got parking tickets. The AWSM staff were wondering what to do for them and I proposed giving them bus tokens but was not taken seriously. I think everyone drove their cars, voting for war and climate chaos while imaging themselves working for peace. I rode the bus from Long Beach and found it pleasant and efficient. I get my reading done on the bus. One regular at AWSM referred to my riding Mass Transit as activism….it is not, it is something the masses need to do to vote for peace and a future.

Leaders that will actually lead in this are few and far between, but here in Long Beach a state senator with real courage is putting something forth:

http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2010/01/29/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-parkingif-california-/

Alan Lowenthal has caused me to make my first contribution this year to a politician.

If other candidates showed this kind of spine I would be more involved in electoral politics.

While here in the Los Angeles area I am attending a lot of progressive and peace events in addition to Arlington West. I attended a peace demonstration last night where a popular sign was “Honk For Peace”. It was pretty noisy as cars and trucks honked for peace. The only vehicles that had any claim for peace or environment, the buses, were trying to negotiate the bus stop which was partially blocked by the demonstrators getting the cars to honk for peace. I’m sorry but I think this is nonsense. How about a sign that reads “Honk if you don’t drive a car”? “Vote For Peace, Kill Your Car”

After the demonstration we went to a showing of the film “American Casino”. about the economic crisis.

As is usual at progressive events, views challenging the status quo among progressives were not allowed. Any attempt to examine the role of the American Way Of Life (AWOL) in the creation of the crisis was ignored. While the moderator’s insistence that the film was accurate was, perhaps, true, it WAS incomplete in its perspective and its conclusions. The many spreadsheets and documents shown did NOT exclude second and subsequent mortgages, in fact commentators repeatedly pointed out that foreclosed homes had multiple mortgages. In those cases, a great many cases, the issue was not the purchase of the home but the reason for the subsequent loans. One featured individual for instance said that her family had owned the home since 1961 and now was losing it. The longest loan is a forty year loan so it was lost due to subsequent loans. So the issue of both wage stagnation, consumerism and individual moral hazard SHOULD have been an appropriate part of the discussion. Next, all was dismissed as the result of deregulation. For this we should look to Joseph Stiglitz (read “Free Fall”, published 2010). Stiglitz was chief economic advisor to Clinton when Clinton signed into law the repeal of Glass Steagall (Stiglitz had previously won the Nobel Prize in Economics and had served as Chief Economist at the World Bank). He had argued, along with Robert Reich, against the repeal but polls indicated that the public wanted more deregulation of the economy. Clinton had learned his lesson many years before when he did the right thing as governor of Arkansas and raised fees on motorists to pay for the cost of motoring and the public rewarded him by voting him out. After that he watched polls carefully and it was public opinion that guided him in ignoring the warnings of Stiglitz. He would not have been influenced by promise of campaign support since he was in his last term. Deregulation was a populist sentiment at the time.

There are clearly two levels of culpability, the creators of the liars loans have a special place in hell because, as the commentators pointed out, they had no skin in the game and emails showed that they knew they were bogus. Many realtors share this place in hell as they knew the housing prices were unsustainable but continued to push people to buy at those prices and, again, took their commissions and had no skin in the game. Below these, the perpetrators of the housing bubble and the liars loans, most everyone was speculating. When one speculates, shouldn’t the speculator share losses as well as gains? IF SO, shouldn’t the homeowner that takes out a second or third loan on equity, speculating that his home will keep rising in value also be responsible for the losses if it goes the other way? It is difficult to argue for accountability for the big speculators if you don’t also hold the small ones accountable.

There is currently an effort to do what Clinton had once tried…I urge you to support Lowenthal:

http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2010/01/29/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-parkingif-california-/

Was Zinn talking about honking for peace or about parking the car with this??

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Historian Howard Zinn

Best wishes, Lane Anderson

–
Follow the Journey: http://www.vfpsb.org/category/lanesblog/
www.LaneAnderson.org
http://www.smartvoter.org/2009/11/03/ca/sba/vote/anderson_r/
http://www.noozhawk.com/politics/article/100709_santa_barbara_council_qa_lane_anderson/
We Are the Antidote – Every Choice a revolutionary Act
S. Brian Willson, June 5, 2008

There is a deeply uncomfortable but clearly structural explanation for the pattern of historic U.S. war-making that continues to this very moment. US Americans, people like you and me, are addicted to insatiable consumption that makes the American Way Of Life totally dependent upon massive exploitation of others and their resources, and the earth herself.
The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.
Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us
makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example.
Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction
in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled.
If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life.
But we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.

a corporation for us

landerson — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:28:32 +0000

Hi Friends,

It seems to me that, if you can’t beat them, join them!

My last read was William Greider’s “Soul of Capitalism”, now seven years old.

I read his most recent, “Come Home America” first.

Before I start my next book, “FreeFall” by Stiglitz, I will post some interesting people and efforts I met in Soul.

Meet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso

and the corporation Mondragon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

http://www.ownershipassociates.com/mcc-intro.shtm

See, where I’m going with this is that if we can’t stop them, I mean the corporatists along with their supreme court lapdogs, and we should try our best to stop them…go to

http://action.citizen.org/t/10315/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=2190

But whatever they do does not keep us from organizing like Mondragon has….and like Kelso and Veblen envisioned.

The solution is local and in your community!

Best, Lane