I am originally from New York. Early on, I became interested in health and healing. I began practicing yoga and vegetarianism as a teen, which led me to spend 5 years in India, where I learned to meditate. I practiced meditation under Munindraji and Goenkaji. I now have over 46 years of Vipassana/Insight meditation experience. Additionally, I realized that growing up a common person in America gave me privileges unprecedented in world history. I felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life serving humanity.
Upon returning from India, I enrolled in Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, for a degree in Buddhist Studies. There I studied with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Chogyam Trugpa Rimpoche. Financial shortages forced me to find gainful employment, which led me to San Francisco in 1976. That’s when I decided to become a nurse, in order to professionally serve the sick and disabled.
Ethics was a required course in nursing college. Until then, I did not know that “justice” was an ethical value. I learned that justice can be divided up into social justice, economic justice, environmental justice and restorative justice. It made me wonder why so many people who consider themselves ethical, discriminate against people who are different, don’t want to pay their taxes because it assists welfare recipients, continue using fossil fuel energy like it is an endless resource, and believe they “have no choice” but to spray the weeds with Roundup. Since learning about Justice, it has become a trajectory in my life.
I married in 1980 and had 2 sons who are now 28 and 23 respectively. Living in Vallejo, the middle schools were very rough. I didn’t see a good choice for a middle school for my son, so I joined 14 other motivated parents and we started a charter middle school, Mare Island Technology Academy <www.mitacademy.org>, which still thrives in Vallejo. Yet, it takes a village to raise a child, and our family could not find community in Vallejo. So we left.
Our family toured most of the United States in a motor home, homeschooling the children, looking for a location with a compatible community. We happily discovered it in Ukiah! We found layer upon layer of community in Mendocino County, where I also found gainful employment as a nurse and purchased a home. We raised our children in the clean air, scenic beauty, and supportive communities of Ukiah Valley.
Once becoming adults, my sons could find no work. Unlike when I was a young adult and jobs were readily available, the current economic environment left no legal, ethical jobs for my sons. So I decided to stand up and serve the community by improving the economy of the county. The first major obstacle to overcome was the unholy alliance giant corporations have with the government.
Governments are formed in a Democracy with the consent of the People to serve and protect us. There is a place for corporations in the economic sphere, but not in government. Government is designed to serve and protect People, yet nowadays, governments protect corporations over the good of the People. Our government has even made corporations into persons with rights protected by the Constitution. Now that money has been made equal to free speech, deep corporate pockets speak much louder than our puny little human voices. Corporate rights are now protected by our government over human rights, and the police who are sworn to protect and defend have turned against their own kind and protect corporations from the People. Topsy-turvy!
One person can change the world. We learn from history of the many single individuals who have made a difference to the whole world. I decided to set the world straight even if I had to do it single-handed! I was powerfully influenced by this quote from the Old Testament, “If not me, then who? And if not now, then when?” So I joined with some other like-minded people and started a chapter of Move to Amend in Ukiah. Joining in coalition with the Alliance for Democracy on the Coast, we got Measure F passed in 2012. It was a measure advising our State and Federal representatives to amend the Constitution to make it clear that constitutional rights are only for natural persons, not fictional persons like corporations, and that money is not speech.
Move to Amend sent me to be the liaison with Occupy Ukiah. There I was delighted to meet many highly motivated people working toward justice on many levels. We were all upset about the unethical business models used by the Wall Street banks based on fraud and the unprecedented investments by those banks in the unregulated derivatives market. We discovered that if the derivatives bubble burst, there is not enough money in the whole world to recover the projected losses of the big banks from derivatives. It became an urgent issue to protect our county’s public funds from the kind of “bail-in” seen in Cyprus in 2013, in which the banks recapitalized their bank after the losses from their risky investments by seizing the assets of the depositors. It could happen here! And the answer was a public bank like the Bank of North Dakota or the Sparkassen or Landesbanken in Germany or those in China, India, Brazil, Russia, or South Africa that are financing double-digit growth in those nations. The next economic downturn is on the horizon and we need to do everything we can to protect the economy of our local area.
Now, we have the opportunity to restore Democracy and empower the People with a home rule charter. The charter will give us more say in our government, and can potentially set the priorities straight to insure that the government is of, by and for the People and not the corporations. I cannot rest until I have done everything that one person can possibly do to bring justice and low-carbon, non-toxic jobs to Mendocino County.
