This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was 121 years old.

The causes of death were two chronic California diseases—greed and our winner-take-all culture.

In Pasadena, the hometown of your columnist, city and game officials remained in denial, claiming that the Rose Bowl was very much alive. They noted that the old stadium in the Arroyo Seco will continue to be called “Rose Bowl” and will host college football playoffs for many years to come.

But the Rose Bowl itself—a post-season football game pitting top teams from the West (Pac-12) and East (Big 10)—is no more. Ever-changing California has lost a rare and reassuringly stable New Year’s tradition.

The Rose Bowl was known as “the granddaddy of them all” because, when first played by the University of Michigan and Stanford on January 1, 1902, it was the first post-season college football bowl game.

Once considered cutting-edge—for example, the game was the occasion for the first transcontinental radio broadcast of a sporting event—the Rose Bowl came to represent values so old-fashioned that they now seem counter-cultural, even foreign, in our angry and nationalist age.

Today, Americans are bitterly divided by politics, region, and various forms of identity. To make things worse, our systems, in everything from education to business to politics, spread division through competitions that identify an uber-winner, making everyone else a loser.

The Rose Bowl incubated a different tradition, inspiring the creation of college football bowl games that brought together Americans from different regions. This system of bowls, headlined by the Rose Bowl, formed a college football system that produced many winners, rather than just one.

Champions of the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl and so on, each of which could claim their own share of a mythical national championship. It was like one of those Scandinavian elections, where four or five parties emerge as winners, and take seats in a coalition government.

But such a unifying and democratic-minded spirit couldn’t survive long in our cutthroat country.

Greed fueled the downfall of the Rose Bowl and its fellow bowls. Television executives and football-playing universities believed they could draw bigger audiences—and make more money—by establishing a college football playoff system.

The Rose Bowl and other bowls resisted a playoff for decades. But in the 21^st century, the pressure for a playoff—from university teams, TV networks, and sports journalists—grew. The leading American politician of this century, Barack Obama, even campaigned on a football playoff, making a “winner-should-take-all” argument: “If you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner.”

Once president, Obama even took time from other efforts to increase top-down national authority—like mass surveillance and mass deportation—to lobby publicly for a national playoff system.

In 2014, the Rose Bowl, the last and strongest holdout against a playoff, surrendered, and agreed to become part of the playoff system. The Rose Bowl negotiated a deal that preserved its East-West  tradition in part; most years, it could pit a Pac-12 and Big Ten champion, but every third year, it would instead host the semifinal of a four-team playoff.

Sadly, that compromise couldn’t save the game. It only delayed, by a few years, the Rose Bowl’s death.

In 2022, television companies and college football conferences moved to expand the playoffs from four teams to 12. This appealed to the Pac 12, Big Ten and other conferences—more of their universities would make the playoff, and make more money, through television rights fees, for doing so.

The Rose Bowl resisted this push, but had little leverage. So the Rose Bowl signed its own death warrant this fall—giving up not only its traditional East-West matchup, but also its traditional time, on the afternoon of New Year’s Day (except in years when Jan. 1 falls on Sunday, and the game shifts to Jan. 2). Instead, the Rose Bowl will be one of the playoff games, likely a quarterfinal.

In Pasadena, game officials and city leaders have shamelessly spun the death of their traditional game as some kind of victory. More tourists might come to our hometown because of greater excitement around a playoff, they’ve said. But that’s nonsense. Pasadena needed to keep a college football game, because it needs the revenues from the broadcast to help fund the Rose Parade. If that meant jettisoning the Rose Bowl in favor of hosting a playoff quarterfinal—as seems likely—they were willing to do it.

Now, reflecting on the death of the Rose Bowl, some of you may think that your columnist has lost perspective when it comes to his hometown tradition. It’s only a game, right?

But it is you, the sanguine, who have lost perspective.

I read the loss of the Rose Bowl through the work of the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a longtime Stanford professor and a friend and mentor to former Gov. Jerry Brown.

Dupuy is a self-described “enlightened doomsayer,” a philosopher of apocalypse. He argues that “humanity is on a suicidal course, headed straight for catastrophe.” Why? Because we don’t respect the sacred things. We blow through limits. And, in doing so, we produce constant calamities and catastrophes, and unleash violence.

The Rose Bowl game is one such sacred ritual that inspired togetherness. Its death takes us one step closer to the end of the world.

A memorial service for the Rose Bowl will be held the afternoon of January 2, 2023. It will be the final Rose Bowl game with a traditional Pac 12-Big Ten matchup, pitting Penn State and the University of Utah. There is no need to send flowers—the Rose Parade always has thousands of them.

The post The Rose Bowl Game Is Dead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Because we peafowl are tired of being California’s leading scapegoat—I mean, scape-bird.

You Californians like to pretend you’re more humane and inclusive than the Floridians and Texans you denounce, for their cruelty to immigrant neighbors and others who might not look or sound the same as they do. But when it comes to how you treat your blue and feathery neighbors, you Californians are no better than Ron DeSantis.

From the San Joaquin to the San Gabriel valleys, property owners and municipalities are ordering mass round-ups of my kind, without warrant or probable cause. Having unlawfully detained my fellow peahens and peacocks, the authorities then seek to relocate us—without providing counsel or a court hearing—to farms on the outskirts of your major regions.

Imagine being grabbed one day and told you’re moving from Pasadena—the leafy hometown I share with this column’s usual author—to a dusty farm in Kern County, without any choice in the matter. The horror! It’s hot up there, and I’m a cultured, urban hen.

You humans justify such atrocities by claiming that we’re foreign invaders—an “invasive species”—because peafowl originated in India. But it’s pure disinformation and discrimination to call me non-native. I was born and raised right here in Los Angeles County, and experts say I make little or no impact on so-called “native” species.

Indeed, my family has probably been in California longer than yours. I’m likely descended from the peafowl that late-19^th-century businessman Lucky Baldwin brought to his land in what is now Arcadia, east of Pasadena. Yet the state committee that oversees bird records still refuses to add us to its list of “naturalized” birds.

So why are you sending us away from the only homes we’ve ever known?

I like to think you’re threatened by our beauty. If you read Nextdoor or the newspapers, you’ll find scare headlines (“Wild Peacocks Terrorize California City”) and claims that we eat too much of the wrong stuff (like your flowers) and make too much noise (we can get loud). But, heck, so do your teenagers!

Still, you complain that we live on the street and poop on the sidewalks. True—but Californians look the other way when their fellow humans do the same things in many city neighborhoods, from L.A.’s Skid Row to San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

Put the public defecation issue aside, and I’d argue that we’re far better community role models than most Californians. We walk everywhere, sustainably, in our hunt for food, while you create greenhouse gases with short drives to the grocery store. We’re social creatures—outside all the time, engaging with our neighbors—while you’re home alone, bingeing Netflix or watching cable news.

And while you’re dividing yourselves with your political obsessions, we don’t even follow American politics. We’re not pro-Trump or super woke. Indeed, you’re most likely to find us in the middle of the road, feathers out—so slow down and don’t run us over! As the poet William Blake wrote, “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.”

You could find homes for us, but I’m not holding my breath. You’re not exactly rushing to find homes for the humans living on the streets. But at least you try to feed unhoused people. Your largest county, Los Angeles, has made it illegal to give us food.

Of course, your strategy of starving us out won’t work. We were omnivores and foragers before it was cool, and so we’ll keep feasting on plants, flowers, seeds, insects, various small reptiles and amphibians, pet food, cheese, and all the vegetables in your garden.

Still want to get rid of us? It won’t be easy. We’re wild animals, and hard to wrangle. And we’re much more loyal to California than most humans.

After all, we don’t have to pay extortionate rents, giant mortgages, or your high taxes.

The post Hey California, the Peafowl Isn’t Your Scape-Bird appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Your columnist is a devout follower of state public health officials and their guidance. I wear two masks in public settings and get tested regularly, even after having had all three of my COVID vaccine shots.

Yet I’m struggling to take California’s latest public health directives seriously—especially the reminder to keep gatherings small and avoid large events. That’s because it’s not clear that state and local officials are serious about what they’re saying.

I can witness their lack of seriousness firsthand in my own hometown of Pasadena.

As the state and Los Angeles County announced a new indoor mask mandate and other updated COVID-safety recommendations in recent weeks, tickets were going on sale for the January 1 Rose Bowl between football teams from the University of Utah and the Ohio State University. Already, Utahans, whose university has never before qualified for the “granddaddy” of bowl games, are descending upon us.

So, it’s likely that 90,000 fans who have traveled from two states with even lower vaccination rates than California’s will cram into a small and historic stadium in the midst of an enormous winter surge of the Delta and Omicron variants. That same day, hundreds of thousands of people more are planning to line Colorado Boulevard to watch the world’s greatest floral parade.

“Our collective actions can save lives this holiday season,” says State Public Health Officer Tomás J. Aragón’s statement reinstating the indoor mask mandate. If officials truly want to save lives, wouldn’t they cancel this exhibition football game? Or, at least, wouldn’t we be seeing a reduction in the number of tickets sold, and the number of people allowed to attend?

And wouldn’t I be hearing, from my many friends at the Tournament of Roses, about plans to enforce physical distancing along the five-and-a-half-mile parade route?

Or to put my question more directly, to Gov. Newsom, who has extended his own emergency powers through March 31: Why should anyone take seriously your mandates and emergency declarations while you allow major sports and entertainment events in California to go on before packed crowds?

Now let me be clear: I’m not advocating for a return to the lockdowns that destroyed businesses, crippled schools, and touched off a society-wide crisis of isolation and mental health. We need to keep the essential institutions of California, our communities, and our economies open.

But the Rose Bowl—while it may be the most entertaining college football game of the year, and a favorite event of your columnist—is not essential. Yes, it can bring a lot of money to our hard-hit tourist industry, to other local businesses, to universities that play in the game, and to the media that broadcast it. But, in this context, it’s a significant risk, even if masking and vaccine rules are carefully enforced (which seems unlikely). In fact, if it were to become a super spreader event or a contributing factor in rising post-holiday case numbers, it might even jeopardize our returns to schools and workplaces after the holidays.

It’s hard for a Pasadena boy to say this, but holding the Rose Bowl in this time and place appears irresponsible.

So, too, is holding the Super Bowl, scheduled to be played in Inglewood, another Los Angeles County city, on February 13. Indeed, the case against the Rose Bowl, a fully outdoor venue, is weaker than that against the Super Bowl, which takes place at SoFi Stadium, which has open sides but a canopy-like roof.

If this emergency continues into the first several weeks of the new year, the Super Bowl needs to be called off or postponed—or at least held without a capacity crowd in the audience. I don’t make this suggestion with any satisfaction. Inglewood and its businesses have invested heavily on their town becoming an international leader in putting on mega-events, and this game is an early test. But if the recent guidance is serious, then the Super Bowl needs to be less super-sized this year.

At this point in the column, I am tempted to suggest ditching the Grammys, set for January 31, and the Oscars, scheduled for March 27, four days before the governor’s emergency order is expected to conclude. But very few people care about these award shows anymore.

Which brings me to the larger problem: that these massive high-profile events make a mockery of public health directives, and those of who follow them. Watching crowds gather fuels cynicism, conspiracy theories, and dangerous social divides. Why do the rich and powerful get to keep having their parties and bowl games, while your office or church feels pressure to call theirs off?

It’s become common for officials and elites to dismiss criticism by blaming the actions of everyday people for the continuing pandemic. My unvaccinated, unmasked neighbors richly deserve our scorn, which renders the tactic effective.

But blame has become a substitute for leadership, clarity, and consistency. Newsom and other authorities won’t say what would have to happen for the state-declared emergency to end. There’s been no discernible shift in strategy among California governments to account for the fact that the coronavirus seems likely to become endemic, a part of life, like the cold or flu. State and local officials, and their media acolytes, defend their lack of clear explanations by citing the virus’ unpredictability.

Meanwhile, they trot out an endless loop of mixed messages. Get vaccinated for your protection—but a vaccine is really not enough protection, so reconsider your holiday plans. And please avoid large gatherings—and root on the Rams and the Chargers all the way to the Super Bowl, right here in their home stadium.

These contradictions add to the widespread, desperate feeling that we’re living in a pandemic purgatory where no one is in charge. You might even say it’s like a college football game in which our team is getting annihilated (800,000 American deaths and counting) and the clock keeps ticking.

In recent weeks, my faith in public health, and my resolve to stay safe, have been shaken. I’ve been thinking of calling up a buddy who can hook me up with Rose Bowl tickets, so I can go to the game, and, in solidarity with my fellow Americans, roll the dice on whether I catch COVID. State and local public health officials don’t seem to mind.

Because if they weren’t playing games with our health, they’d call off the games, right?

The post Quit Playing Games With Our Health appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The stakes of the presidential election are also peculiar and personal, especially for me. The results may determine which of two old friends—my fellow editors on our high school newspaper—ends up being the next Californian on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mine is a strange circumstance. I spent my high school years, 1988 through 1991, at Polytechnic, a small (my graduating class had just 85 students) and academically rigorous private school in Pasadena. Late in my freshman year, I joined a group of students and a popular history teacher, Greg Feldmeth, in starting a school newspaper. We called it The Paw Print.

I became the paper’s first editor-in-chief, a job I shared with a classmate named Jim Ho, a doctor’s son from San Marino. Jim grew up to become, in 2017, a judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month, President Trump added Jim’s name to the short list of judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court.

One of our smartest Paw Print reporters, and one of our successors as editor-in-chief, was Leondra Kruger, a doctor’s daughter from South Pasadena. Leondra grew up to become, in 2015, a justice on the California Supreme Court. Multiple press reports now identify Leondra as one of the top contenders to be Joe Biden’s first appointee to the Supreme Court.

Over the years, I’ve kept in touch with both Jim and Leondra, rooting them on as they rose through the legal ranks (while never missing a chance to tease them for wasting their journalistic chops on careers as legal functionaries). Since they became judges, I’ve read their opinions and marveled at what has changed, and what hasn’t, since I edited their raw copy.

But now that they’re real contenders for the highest court in the land, I’ve developed mixed feelings at the prospect of the ascent of either, especially in this frightening moment in American history.

When I turn on the news and see the toxic stew of American politics and the ugliness of a court confirmation hearing, I’m filled with fear for any friend of mine who might be thrust into such awfulness. And while I’m proud to know two people as great as Jim and Leondra, I also recognize that having two of the top two dozen high court prospects come from the same elite San Gabriel Valley school is not exactly an advertisement for American equality.

But my biggest fears are selfish. I’ve read of how the bitter political battles over the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ruined old friendships and divided the alumni community at the private school they both attended, Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown Prep. Their classmates were deluged with media inquiries, and I’m writing this column defensively, as a public statement to which I can point as I turn down the interview requests I’ve started to get about Jim and Leondra.

I’m also offering this as a prayer that our nation’s political and legal civil wars won’t eclipse my memories of high school days and divide my high school friends.

Those memories are mostly sweet. Poly mixed old-line Pasadena families with hyper-ambitious kids who had either fled (as I did) or avoided Pasadena’s struggling public schools. Immigrant families produced many of the best students, including Jim (born in Taiwan) and Leondra (whose mother is Jamaican). My AP chemistry teacher once dubbed me and the three other white kids in his class “the Caucasian Corner.”

Teachers were tough, and writing was emphasized; my fellow students included not only these two future judges but the screenwriters of Ocean’s 11 and School of Rock. Poly also had a softer side: It allowed you to try just about anything you could imagine. Jim and I were among those who imagined a school paper.

In that pursuit, we became fast friends. We ran the paper by rough consensus, with about a dozen editors deciding what to publish, often with Mr. Feldmeth’s counsel. Jim and I enjoyed stirring the pot, from arguing that the school tolerated too much underage drinking to investigating the ethics of water balloon attacks on freshmen. Jim made trouble by compiling a feature called “Paws and Claws”—a list of one-paragraph blasts of student praise and complaints.

Jim Ho’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1991.

Jim was super-intense; he walked fast, laid out pages fast, and drove too fast, in a Ford Probe with so many extra options that The Paw Print’s car critic, whom I assigned to review student and teacher vehicles, called it the “Fordari Probarossa.” Jim loved arguing with our classmates and wrote with a passionate, sometimes over-the-top style. As his editor, I tried, and mostly failed, to tone him down as he campaigned to strip graduating seniors of the right to vote on the following year’s student government (since they wouldn’t live with the consequences of their choice).

I didn’t anticipate his judicial career, but I should have. He never missed an episode of NBC’s L.A. Law (he had a major crush on Susan Dey’s litigator). He had a strong sense of justice and helped crusade against what we saw as an unfair regime of student discipline. “Tardiness is treated as a more serious crime than cheating on exams,” the future Judge Ho wrote in his final Paw Print editorial. “Punishments must fit the crime, not the criminal.”

Leondra, a sophomore when we were seniors, was as cool and calm as Jim was hot and polarizing. One of the youngest people in her class, she could be funny and gossipy with friends, but she chose her words with great care, which made you listen more closely.

Leondra was deeply interested in the world outside Poly’s cloistered gates. She wrote for us about a Poly student who had left to go to public school and interviewed local teachers about California’s problems with education. As editor-in-chief, she published smart pieces about the school’s library, diversity, drugs, and even student sex. She also gracefully handled all the stories about the most traumatic event in our school’s life: the shooting death of a beloved student, Ochari D’Aiello, during summer break.

The Paw Print became smarter and more serious, with sharper editing and shorter stories, once Leondra took over. She ruled by consensus, in The Paw Print tradition, but had a strong backbone—she didn’t back down when people complained about coverage. When one student-contributor complained about his piece being cut, she replied: “When it comes to writers, sometimes people think their articles will only reflect on them, but in The Paw Print articles reflect on the newspaper as a whole.”

Leondra and I both went to Harvard, and we worked together again on the student newspaper, The Crimson. There she mostly resisted the urge to tell embarrassing stories about me to my girlfriend, another Crimson editor, now my wife. Leondra wasn’t the only future Supreme Court contender at the college paper; we became friends with Steve Engel, now a top Justice Department official who, like Jim, was recently added to President Trump’s Supreme Court list.

Leondra Kruger’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1993.

After graduation, I became a newspaper reporter, which would rob me of most respect for the law (I’ve seen too much legislation written by the people and interests with money). But I kept tabs on the legal careers of Leondra and Jim with grudging envy. I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the haphazard ways that careers advanced in the disintegrating media business, and the systematic ways my high school friends touched the different stations of the cross for would-be justices.

Leondra found her way to Yale Law (applying her Paw Print skills to serving as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal), clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens, and worked in the U.S. solicitor general’s office, eventually arguing cases before the Supreme Court. She married a distinguished lawyer, and I’d thought California lost her to D.C. for good—until Gov. Jerry Brown unexpectedly called her home to take a seat on the state supreme court. Back in California, she has displayed her quiet intelligence and sense of duty—the L.A. Times reported that, just a few weeks after giving birth to her second child, she traveled to L.A. to hear cases.

Jim went to Stanford and worked briefly for state Sen. Quentin Kopp, a rare elected independent, before enrolling at the University of Chicago Law School, where his conservatism forcefully emerged. We kept in touch, and served as groomsmen in each other’s weddings. He worked in all three branches of the federal government—for Congress under Texas Sen. John Cornyn, in the Bush Justice Department, and as clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. (I dutifully reported his high school driving to the FBI when interviewed for his background checks.)

Despite political differences, we stayed friends; he even got me into a Federalist Society event, where, despite aggressive reporting, I failed to spot anyone eating children or selling Supreme Court seats. Jim married a distinguished Texas lawyer—a dead-ringer for Dey—and followed her home to the Lone Star State, where he served as the state’s solicitor general, argued cases before the Supreme Court, and, to your columnist’s dismay, dropped his Southern California roots from official bios. The support of Sen. Ted Cruz, who had been Jim’s predecessor as Texas solicitor general, was crucial to Jim’s appointment to the federal bench three years ago.

If appointed to the Supreme Court, each of my high school newspaper buddies would be celebrated as a history-maker—Leondra as the first Black woman justice, Jim as the first Asian American justice. But, of course, they come from the same place, and I can’t help but see the familiar in their stories.

Profiles of Leondra sometimes include progressive activists and legal scholars complaining that she’s cautious, moderate, too grounded in the facts—just like the student journalist she was at The Paw Print. Jim, meanwhile, has gotten national attention for writing provocative, argumentative, and accessible judicial opinions, just like the pieces he authored as a student journalist. Critics say he writes too much like a columnist, offering opinions about policy and politics and morality, rather than just deciding cases. I confess that some of his rulings—like an opinion suggesting that giving police more leeway to use force would somehow stop mass shootings—make me wish I still had the power to edit him.

The overwhelmingly liberal majority of our old schoolmates would prefer to see Leondra on the court. I’ve watched her on the bench, and she is certainly the kind of judge I’d want with my fate in a court’s hands—smart, kind, and carefully even-handed.

On group texts, classmates sometimes grow angry at decisions made by Jim. (“Jimmy Crow Ho” was the theme of one bitter thread after he joined a decision making it harder to vote in Texas.) But our country, and the politicians who choose judges, seem to prefer jurists like Jim—attention-getting and forthrightly ideological figures who, like Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, can infuriate or inspire political bases.

We also prefer our judges young, which is why both my high school contemporaries are on short lists simultaneously. This is not because younger judges are better. It’s because these are lifetime appointments, and because those in power today want to lock their preferred judges onto the bench for as long as possible. Leondra and Jim are hot prospects since they’re in their mid-40s; in another 10 years, they might be considered too old for serious consideration.

This is a rotten state of affairs, both for the judges and the judged. I can’t imagine a more stressful time in life to ascend to a huge, high-profile job than in these sandwich years, when you’re both raising young children and taking care of older relatives. And for the country, giving such power to younger, less experienced judges is sub-optimal. Judges are supposed to consider long-term impacts and timeless principles, the sort of thinking that is better informed by age and experience. Ideally, America would have wise old judges who can check the excesses of young and energetic elected officials. Instead, America has things upside down. Our judges are younger and precious, while our most powerful politicians are tired, geriatric cases.

My biggest worry, though, is not about the ages of new justices, but about the court that Jim or Leondra might join. The sheer power of the U.S. Supreme Court is frightening, and growing. As our faltering republic finds it harder to resolve disputes and make progress, just five justices will have the power to make major decisions to cancel the democratic and life choices that we Americans make.

I have the deepest affection for these two judges I’ve known for more than half my life. There is no doubting their intelligence and their integrity. I would trust Leondra and Jim with that most precious of things, my children’s lives. And if I could reform the Supreme Court, I’d require its justices to operate more like The Paw Print editors of our day, with all nine required to reach a consensus before they publish any decision.

But, alas, our high court is not my high school newspaper. And I find it impossible to fully trust Leondra or Jim or any other living soul with the vast and unaccountable powers of a U.S. Supreme Court justice seat.

The post Two Would-Be Supreme Court Justices and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In May 1872, after suffering through another extremely cold, damp winter, a group of 150 middle-class neighbors from Indianapolis, Indiana, decided to leave home. The group included lawyers, doctors, journalists, and teachers, many of whom were looking for a more equable climate to alleviate ailments from asthma to tuberculosis. Led by Thomas Balch Elliott, a former Army surgeon and prominent businessman, the neighbors pooled their resources and hired Elliott’s brother-in-law Daniel Berry to go west and find land for a colony.

This is the story of that colony, and how it eventually became the small but world-famous city of Pasadena.

The Indianans’ search occurred within the post-Civil War wave of expansion. In the hopes of populating the West with white, small-scale farmers, the U.S. government, via the Homestead Act of 1862, allotted private 160-acre parcels to homesteaders in the West. By the 1870s this vision, reinforced by reports of lush landscapes and thriving new agricultural and urban economies, prompted many to move west in search of social mobility and wealth, purchasing lands that held histories they often knew nothing about.

In 1872, after considering several sites, the Indianans decided that Southern California would be the best place to build their own colony. They instructed Berry to seek a location with a good climate, fertile land near an abundant water source, and the opportunity to build small, individual homesteads.

By August 1873, Berry’s travels had taken him as far south as Cajon Ranch in San Diego and eastward to Rancho Santa Anita in the San Gabriel Valley. He was taken with the amount of tillable land and access to plentiful water, and excitedly wrote Elliott about the abundant fruit trees and expansive orange groves.

Despite his enthusiasm, Berry faced a financial obstacle. The colony had authorized him to pay no more than $5 per acre, but these beautiful and fruitful lands were priced at about four times that much. Undeterred, Berry sought to convince Elliott and the Indiana Colony to increase the budget. They refused, and Berry continued north into the San Fernando Valley, where the land was more reasonably priced but lacked a reliable water source.

In September 1873, Berry trekked east to Rancho San Pascual. The rancho land might have felt new to Berry, but it had a long, rich history. Known as Hahamog’na, this was the ancestral land of the Tongva people. By the time of the Spanish conquest of the region in 1771, the Tongva had a thriving society with its own culture, economy, labor practices, and principles of land use. Spanish rule brought with it a mission institution that imposed religious conversion and assimilation intended to eradicate indigenous culture. Franciscans at the San Gabriel Mission took possession of Tongva lands and sought to develop them according to Spanish ideals.

For over 60 years, missionaries controlled the thousands of acres that would eventually become Rancho San Pascual. Shortly after Mexican independence, the Mexican government issued the 1834 federal secularization order that emancipated mission Indians and allowed civilian settlers access to former mission lands. This ushered in California’s period of ranchos, but former San Gabriel Mission Indians were rarely allowed to access these lands. Throughout California’s Mexican period from 1821-1848, the region’s former mission lands—about 13,000 acres in all—were consolidated into Rancho San Pascual and managed by various owners who competed for control.

In 1840, California ranchero Manuel Garfias took over San Pascual but he would prove to be its last Mexican owner. After the Mexican-American War, new land laws followed in 1848. Garfias was dispossessed of his rancho, which passed into American hands. By the 1870s the new owner, Benjamin Davis Wilson, a former mayor of Los Angeles and state legislator, began selling parcels to interested parties with the help of his business partner John S. Griffin.

Daniel Berry, working for the Indianans, visited San Pascual in 1873. Mesmerized by its beauty, Berry wrote Elliott detailing the fruit orchards, richness of the soil, wonderful air quality, warm climate, and vast acreage. Over the next few months, Berry sought to convince Elliott that the colony had to increase its investment to $10 per acre. After receiving countless letters detailing everything from the region’s lifestyle to the health benefits of the climate, Elliott finally agreed to let Berry offer $15 per acre.

The colony was on its way to acquiring its new home when the financial Panic of 1873 struck, decimating members’ savings and causing many of the original would-be colonists to back out of the endeavor. Berry requested $1,000 for a deposit from the remaining members. To his disappointment, the colony only approved $500. Months passed, and the Indiana Colony collected only $200 of the promised $500.

Berry organized a group of Southern California investors, as well as some from as far away as Cincinnati and Boston, to provide the remaining capital. Together they established the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association (SGOGA) with an individual buy-in of $250. Berry’s group of investors raised a sum of $25,000 and then invited Elliott and the 15 remaining members of the Indiana Colony to join them in their venture. Elliott, not wanting to miss out on acquiring San Pascual, gathered $3,000 from the colonists to supplement the amount already collected. A series of convoluted transactions followed, and the Indiana Colony finally had its land.

During the winter of 1873-74, Elliott and the 15 colonists migrated to their new home. On January 27, 1874, the colony was formally established. Land allotments were distributed, and colonists began cultivating wheat and barley, at first without success. But the colonists pressed on, expanding into grapes and citrus trees. Supported by wealthier members, the Indiana Colony moved towards bringing a steady water supply into their community, building a three-mile pipeline by May 1874.

Before the end of 1874, the colony had grown by some dozen families and added a tract of about 2,500 acres to its eastern boundary, but colonists were concerned that the place still did not have a formal name. In his letters to Elliott, Berry often referred to the settlement as the Indiana Colony or Muscat. The former referenced the colonists’ origins and the latter the Muscat grapes that grew in the region. Although he used Muscat, Berry thought the word sounded too much like muskrat and encouraged Elliott to find a name that could convey the land’s beauty.

After the consideration of various names, they chose Pasadena.

There are several stories of the name’s origin. Some contend that one of the colony’s founders, Calvin Fletcher, was said to have inquired from local historian Hiram Reid if there was a Spanish name that captured the ranch’s landscape. Reid related to Fletcher a conversation in which former rancho owner Manuel Garfias referred to the ranch as la llave del rancho, the key to the valley, because of where the rancho sat in relation to the larger acreage—at the top of the valley, at its very crown. Fletcher who was unable to pronounce the phrase, simply extrapolated its meaning and brought that to Elliott for consideration.

The second story, which is the one more accepted as part of local folklore, states that Elliott asked a friend who had formerly been a missionary among the midwestern Ojibwe (then called Chippewa), to translate the Spanish phrase la llave del rancho into an “Indian word of pleasant sound” that would mean “the key to the ranch.” With an element of imperialist nostalgia for a place they themselves had transformed, the word they settled on was Pasadena. (The town is still known as the Crown City, the “crown” of the San Gabriel Valley.)

During the 1870s, citrus groves, grape vineyards, and homesteads replaced the cattle grazing lands of the Mexican rancho period. The bustling community boasted a church, a general store, school, mail service, and a stagecoach route. By the 1880s, Pasadena was one of California’s greatest fruit-growing districts. On March 24, 1880, the community celebrated its first citrus festival to highlight its thriving agricultural production. As the settlers’ crops grew, Pasadena’s reputation grew as well. The completion of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad in 1885 accelerated delivery of oranges to other parts of the region and the country. Aside from expanding trade routes, the railroad ushered in a momentous land boom that drew speculators and would-be settlers into the area, changing Pasadena forever.

An influx of visitors during the mid-1880s prompted the growth of a tourist industry catering to this affluent clientele. Soon resort-style lodgings such as Raymond Hotel, with an estimated cost of $200,000, provided a destination for the wealthy visitors who wintered in Pasadena. Many residents invested their money into tourist-oriented businesses such as restaurants, banks, and shops. The community was incorporated as the City of Pasadena in February 1887 during this period of unprecedented growth.

Eventually, the land boom collapsed. Stalled subdivisions, vacant storefronts, and dry and abandoned groves were the physical markers of the economic bust. Not to be defeated, Pasadena’s residents moved to rebuild their homesteads, often citing the Indiana Colony’s goal of creating a stable community of small-scale farmers.

The early years of the 1890s brought another land boom. Once again, the economy exploded with the capital of wealthy easterners who sought land for their winter homes. This time residents proceeded more cautiously, choosing to exploit the city’s reputation for majestic, Edenic landscapes, succulent fruits, and beautiful blooming roses in the middle of the winter.

In January 1891 Pasadena held its first Tournament of Roses Parade, complete with flower-decorated horse-drawn floats, ostrich races, and displays of oranges and other fruits. This parade would become an annual New Year’s tradition, famous across the United States, drawing participants and spectators from around the world. The event, and the moment of its inception, defined Pasadena through its climate, natural beauty, and especially its pioneer history, harkening back to the Indiana Colony that was built on Tongva land, former mission territory, and a Mexican rancho.

The post Pasadena, California, Was Born in Indiana During the Cold, Damp Winter of 1872 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m a regular rider of “The Brain Train,” officially known as the Gold Line on the L.A. Metro system. The Gold Line is a light rail running from the eastern San Gabriel Valley into downtown L.A. and then back out again to East L.A. Along the way, it connects enough smart institutions—from innovative community colleges, to a leading cancer center, to the world’s greatest scientific university—to explode stereotypes about public transportation and Southern California itself.

Yes, other parts of California may claim brainier trains: The Caltrain commuter rail runs the Silicon Valley from San Francisco to Stanford to San Jose; San Diego is in the process of extending its trolley to UCSD; and Sonoma and Marin Counties are about to inaugurate the SMART train (although that’s an acronym, not a judgment of the intelligence of a delay-plagued project).

But for Los Angeles County—where we’re known for our good looks but not for our brains or public transportation—the Gold Line is a revelation. And over the next several years, the line will be extended at both ends in ways that could make it a candidate for the title (with apologies to the Red Line connecting Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.) of “the best educated rail line in the country.”

Even today, you can reach a startling diversity of intellectual institutions on the line. Starting at the Brain Train’s current eastern terminus on Atlantic Avenue, you’ll be within walking distance of East Los Angeles College. Get on the train there, and you can stop for a drink at Eastside Luv (a Boyle Heights hotspot offering art, music, and poetry) and then take the line downtown, where you’ll pass by the Japanese American National Museum and SCI-Arc, one of the world’s leading architectural schools. North of downtown, the Southwest Museum, a library and archive devoted to Native American history and artifacts, is at the Mount Washington Station. And if you disembark at Highland Park, you can ride your bike to Occidental, the elite private college that is one of President Obama’s alma maters.

When the train enters Pasadena, it goes right through the south campus of ArtCenter College of Design, a globally distinguished school, and later stops at Memorial Park, a block from the headquarters of Parsons, the leading engineering firm. Then the Gold Line turns east, with stops that are a walk to innovative Pasadena City College (among the best in the state at transferring students to four-year institutions) and a short bike ride to that wonder of science, Caltech, where planets are discovered and Nobels are won.

The Gold Line also connects the neighborhood where the Caltech-affiliated characters in the longstanding CBS sitcom hit, Big Bang Theory, live. (I have a question for the screenwriters: Why doesn’t Jim Parsons’ character, Sheldon, ever take the Brain Train?)

Further east, the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte has its own stop on the Brain Train. And for now, the Gold Line ends at two higher education institutions: Citrus College, which the Brookings Institution has called one of the top 10 community colleges in the United States, and Azusa Pacific, a major Christian university. But plans are already underway to take the Gold Line further east, with a stop near the University of La Verne before eventually reaching the Claremont Colleges, the seven-school consortium.

The Brain Train’s educational resume runs beyond universities. The line runs right through two of the state’s top school districts—Arcadia and South Pasadena—and connects easily through bus transfers to two others, San Marino and La Cañada. The Gold Line also offers thought-provoking views of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains and of Mt. Wilson Observatory, once essential to the study of astronomy.

But do all the nerds along the line ride the train? No, but many cost-conscious ones do. The 31-mile-long Brain Train costs just $1.75 per boarding, and transfers to other lines are free. While ridership is flat overall on Metro, ridership has been growing on the Brain Train, which registered an all-time high for weekday boardings (more than 53,000) in June.

I’m often struck by the nerdiness of my fellow passengers. The Brain Train offers a smooth, quiet, and comfortable ride, and so it’s one of the rare public spaces where you’ll see people reading actual books. On recent rides, I encountered Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846-1873, two volumes of the late Richard Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and Salvador Dali’s cookbook, Les diners de Gala.

The Brain Train is likely to get brainier, particularly if the transit connection ends up encouraging more cross-enrollment in classes for students or research collaboration between faculty at Gold Line-adjacent institutions. Schools along the line are already encouraging their students and staff to use it. At a public event late last year, a Citrus College administrator argued that the Gold Line is making it easier for students to reach the campus and complete their degrees, and the CEO of the Claremont Colleges said it would make field research by students and faculty much easier.

There also are efforts by educational institutions to enhance the Gold Line corridor. Most notably, ArtCenter, in Pasadena, is preparing a 15-year master plan that would launch a new bikeway near the Gold Line and build new student housing with green public spaces—Quads—that would be directly over the rail line, linking buildings on either side.

The Gold Line is “our extended classroom,” said Art Center’s associate vice president Rollin Homer at the 2016 public event. “We’re embracing it—we’re going to live and create alongside it.”

The Brain Train is still an urban rail line with typical problems. (I encountered a pile of human excrement on a seat on one morning, and recently assisted a half dozen fellow passengers in subduing an intoxicated rider.) But as someone who grew up in Pasadena before the line arrived in 2003, and now lives four blocks from a stop, I love the way the Gold Line connects me to familiar places in new ways.

The Brain Train, in other words, can really make you think.

The post L.A.’s Revelatory Light Rail for Nerds appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I recently learned that, in the second grade, I was part of presidential history.

Every morning during the 1980-1981 school year, I walked the five blocks between my family’s home in southwest Pasadena and Allendale Elementary School, where I was in Beverly Thomas’ class. Sometimes I went back in the evening to play in the Little League at Allendale Park, adjacent to school.

The round trip seemed unremarkable then, as I passed homes and dumpy apartment buildings. But just last month, my hometown of Pasadena announced that my path had crossed with greatness. The city installed a plaque on the sidewalk outside one of those dumpy apartment buildings I used to pass—an ugly place at 253 Glenarm Street. The plaque explains that an Occidental College sophomore occupied one of the apartments in 1980 and 1981.

The occupant’s name was Barack Obama.

This revelation—that the president of the United States was once my neighbor—might seem trivial. But it has had a powerful impact, making the California news and drawing a crowd of more than 200 people for the plaque’s December dedication. Seizing on this public relations momentum, my own state senator, Anthony Portantino, has proposed renaming a portion of the 134 Freeway, connecting Pasadena with Glendale, the “President Barack H. Obama Freeway.”

A plaque is seen in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

I still live less than two miles from the sidewalk plaque, and coach my kids in the same Little League where I played. And so, while I’m not a big fan of the president, I’ve found myself stopping at least a half dozen times to see the plaque over the holidays. The draw is some combination of childhood nostalgia and the deliciously incongruous 21st century updating of the president-from-a-log-cabin story. Plus, I’m never alone—there always seem to be other curious locals in front of the otherwise forgettable apartment building.

But I must confess I also find the plaque—and my own interest in it— embarrassing, in an “Aren’t we behaving like small-town hicks?” sort of way. And, for the record, I felt that embarrassment even before my in-laws, visiting from Chicago, a city somewhat familiar with the president, made fun of the plaque when I took them to see it.

Obama, after all, left us as fast as he could, transferring from Occidental to Columbia University in New York City after that sophomore year. And the plaque is the product of a conversation between Obama and a city councilman in which the president said he’d loved Pasadena—but could only remember that the street he’d lived on started with a G. (A search of phone directories and utility records identified the address, according to the Pasadena Star-News).

So why is my hometown holding so tightly to such a thin connection to a president? There’s our strong commitment to celebrating African-American history in a city with one of California’s oldest African-American communities (Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena). It’s also understandable that Californians are clinging to a president for whom we voted twice, particularly at a time when we’re confronting a president-elect that most of us see as a threat to the republic.

But that doesn’t justify our state’s lack of caution in celebrating Obama so robustly and so quickly, even before he leaves office. There are already two schools named for Obama in Los Angeles, and another in Oakland; more are likely on the way. The town of Seaside, near Monterey, gave its Broadway Avenue a second name—Obama Way—six years ago. And scientific researchers even named a lichen they discovered in the Channel Islands after the president. (The fungus is officially called Caloplaca obamae).

Such celebrations seem excessive because the president hasn’t exactly reciprocated them. The president didn’t dote on California with half the passion Bill Clinton once did. Obama came to our state mostly to raise money and play golf. And he didn’t always have our best interests at heart. He attacked Silicon Valley for not collaborating with his administration on mass surveillance of questionable legality. He turned down our recession-era requests for financial assistance that would have prevented the worst of the state budget cuts. And he deported an awful lot of our undocumented neighbors.

A woman takes a picture of the plaque in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

At the very least, high honors for this president should be seen as premature. It’s always dangerous to name things after living people, and he is just 55 years old, with—potentially—decades to screw up his reputation here. Depending on what his successor does, Obama’s legacy may soon seem rather ephemeral.

So why not hold off on renaming more schools or roads for him?

Yes, the stretch of the 134 Freeway in question is near Obama’s alma mater. But that’s too big an honor for a guy who spent such little time here in his youth—and was here only long enough to tie up traffic as an adult. It’d be more appropriate to name that bit of freeway for Mildred Pierce, the title character of the novel and 1945 film noir, whose daughter, a bratty social climber, dreams of leaving drab Glendale for higher social status in Pasadena. (Perhaps the president, who loves film and literature, might prefer that as well).

In spite of that note of caution, I must confess that I feel differently about the sidewalk plaque in my old neighborhood. Yes, the plaque—or, as some of us locals prefer to call it, the Obama Monument—is hokey. And yes, if you have friends from Pasadena, you may have to get used to us bragging that Obama was once our homie.

But I say we swallow our pride and keep the plaque (and maybe even have T-shirts made). It’s a sweet little reminder that sometimes history is hiding just around the corner, and living in a really shabby apartment.

The post My Hometown’s Rush to Honor Obama Says More About Us Than Him appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s not just how nice it’d be to have all the surfaces in Capitol offices covered in flowers (legislators produce more than enough manure to make such a project sustainable). Or how much more fun it would be to visit government offices if you could bring a barbecue and camp out the night before your appointment (imagine the resulting cultural change at the DMV). It’s that the Rose Parade is governed with the accountability, focus, planning, and public participation that are so hard to find in California governments.

My bias on the subject of the Rose Parade runs deep, but so does my experience. I grew up in Pasadena, five blocks south of the parade’s Colorado Boulevard route, and today I reside in the town next door, a short walk from where the floats line up on New Year’s Eve. So I know for a fact that January 1 is the most important day of any year, when the world’s attention is focused on our sunny Southern California.

Special things happen when enough people spend an entire year getting ready for just one day. You can talk all you want about living for the moment, but the Rose Parade teaches that nothing allows you to appreciate today’s little moments like always keeping an eye on next year. I can mark the calendar by parade preparations. There’s the selection of an annual theme and new float designs in January. Float construction begins in the spring; the summer sees float testing and, in some years, the naming of a grand marshal; and in the fall, we pick six Rose princesses and a queen.

And this Pasadena kid knows the holidays are coming not by any change in the weather (it’s always warm here) but when the temporary parade stands go up at the corner of Orange Grove and Colorado. Then, there’s the glorious week between Christmas and New Year’s, when we greet the bands and the equestrians and football teams and stay up all night gluing flowers to floats.

This never-ending planning around fixed deadlines forces all sorts of good habits that the rest of California could learn from. In state government, endless delays are the status quo. Environmental reviews and master plans and legislation are routinely pushed back for months or years. But the Rose Parade can’t be pushed back. Preparations for the 2016 edition are already underway, and float design for next year will begin as In-N-Out burgers are being handed out to weary marchers at the end of this year’s parade.

Today’s California keeps adding all kinds of new tolls and fees—for bags at the grocery store, for certain lanes on the freeway—and it’s become routine for the powerful and the rich to buy special access. But while the Rose Parade does sell some grandstand tickets, anyone who can find a spot to stand or sit along the 5 ½ mile parade route can watch for free. Of the estimated half million people who attend the parade each year, only about one in 10 are ticketholders.

The Tournament of Roses Association, which has been running the New Year’s Day parade since 1895, is also a model of efficient, dedicated public service—at least compared to Sacramento, where you find a high turnover of legislators and aides, and where staffers often lack knowledge about the policy areas they are supposed to tackle. In Pasadena, the 935 volunteer members of the Tournament of Roses are assigned to specific committees that each govern a different aspect of the event, and develop deep expertise. And while state government often lacks accountability, parade volunteers are graded on their work.

A parade volunteer—or “White Suiter” (named for the required uniform)—ascends to an executive position only after many years of successful service. And for those named to the association’s executive committee, there’s an apprenticeship of eight years before they serve as president for one parade and game. The future president does a different job each year in order to develop full command of the organization.

The wisdom of this approach became apparent five years ago when my friend Gary DiSano died during his presidency, after his years of apprenticeship and a few months before his parade. It was tragic, but the Tournament was full of people who were fully prepared to pull off Gary’s plans.

Tournament volunteers are assisted by a small full-time staff (and, as in the Capitol, there is sometimes grumbling that staffers are too powerful) and a host of float designers and builders and flower brokers and even glue makers whose deep knowledge of parade details is honored and valued. (Just let Silicon Valley try to disrupt this business.)

These people are prepared for anything. While the state has dawdled on replacing outdated infrastructure and quake-proofing public buildings, the Rose Parade never stints on safety. There are constant float tests and fire drills; everyone must be able to evacuate every float in 45 seconds. One executive, by cheeky tradition, is even tasked with making sure it doesn’t rain on the parade.

California is a mismatched mix of regions, and our government is overstuffed with agencies and commissions that work at cross-purposes. But the Rose Parade pulls off an event that satisfies floral designers and those who can’t tell a tulip from a tiger lily. It manages simultaneously to serve as our community’s homegrown gathering of the year and a global TV spectacle watched by tens of millions. Parade participants themselves are a blend of locals and people from the far corners of the world.

Like any local parade fan, I have my complaints. The parade leadership, despite some improvements, still doesn’t come close to reflecting the diversity of the San Gabriel Valley. The parade has gotten shorter (down to 45 floats from 60), in part to accommodate TV’s desire for a shorter, two-hour parade. And maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly, but haven’t some of those corporate logos on the floats gotten a little too big?

But these problems pale in comparison to the value of the parade’s message: No excuses and no slow starts. If you plan ahead, you can be in full bloom right from the very start of a new year.

The post California Should Be More Like the Rose Parade appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I assumed he was preparing food for the family to eat later in the day. Instead, he told me the sandwiches were going to nearby apartments of elder adults who had very limited access to food. He said this would likely be their meal for the day.

I asked if I could visit the seniors he was helping, maybe bring a casserole or some flowers to cheer up their day. And so the following Monday morning, my friend Marie and I brought little tuna casseroles and cupcakes, and joined the clergyman on visits to three apartments within three miles of my house.

Each stop went from bad to worse. The first apartment, a block from the Rose Parade route, was home to a lovely woman whose hands were crippled by arthritis and whose back was curled over. She could only push buttons on her microwave and use pop-top cans. The second apartment wasn’t much better. The third apartment stank of stagnant air and animal feces. A very thin woman with extremely swollen ankles the size of baseball bats and large eyeglasses sat on a bare daybed mattress with no sheets or blankets. Her closet door was open, and only one dress was hanging in it. She offered us water–apologizing for having nothing else to share–and said that the glasses were in the cupboard. We found just one glass and nothing else but cans of cat food. Her fridge was empty.

We chatted about the weather and the TV show she’d been watching, but my head was spinning, and I couldn’t focus. It felt like hours had passed, but it was only minutes. I’d walked by this building a hundred times, coffee and cell phone in hand–often on my way to or from a meal.

As I stood with my hand on the door, I felt I had to make a decision right then and there. Do I do nothing and let this be someone else’s problem, and feel pain and intense guilt when this woman dies from neglect? Or do I get involved?

An hour later I dashed into Trader Joe’s in South Pasadena and shared my shock at what I’d just seen and experienced. A wonderful man named Joe–not the Trader Joe–told me to come back on Wednesday. He would help me get some easy-to-open items that the people I’d just visited could eat.

Joe was as good as his word. He helped fold down the seats of my Prius and loaded dolly after dolly of fruits and boxed vegetables. He explained that this food was excess, and the store donated it to make room for newer shipments. (I would learn later that other grocery stores–but not all–do this and more) There was so much food that I could only make left turns; I couldn’t see out the other window.

I soon learned more about the 49 million Americans–one in six of us–who are unsure of where their next meal will come from. I also learned that grocery stores and many food-derived businesses discard their excess unexpired food daily instead of donating it: Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted. My big question was: Where did this discarded food go, and how could we get it to struggling people like those I had met in my neighborhood?

For the next two and a half years, I made weekly pick-ups at Trader Joe’s and delivered food to organizations in the Pasadena area, including the AIDS Service Center, the Union Station Homeless Services, and Holy Family Church’s Giving Bank. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about food waste.

In spring 2010, I attended a convention in San Diego on organics recycling and sustainability to gain an overview of the waste industry. I wanted to be able to have a respectable conversation if a food supplier chose to not donate edible food. For three days, I was a human sponge, absorbing information about sustainability, composting, and renewable energy. The waste industry didn’t particularly care about feeding people, but I gained an enormous amount of respect for its passion and commitment to efficiency and reducing waste. The people I spoke with cared as much about preserving the same pristine organic food I was interested in, just for different reasons.

When I got home I reached out to local agencies in need of food: homeless shelters, churches, food banks from Long Beach to the Westside, senior centers, children’s homes. I asked them how often they needed donations, and whether they required food to be prepared and pre-packaged or if it could be kitchen-made. Then I approached the health department about food safety regulations. Through these meetings I realized that it wasn’t as simple as taking food that one place didn’t need and delivering it to where it was needed. Donating food, I discovered, had a unique set of rules that were outdated and hadn’t been adapted for today’s state-of-the-art methods of heating and cooling food.

I realized the process could be made much more user-friendly so that more cities and companies would want to participate.

In 2012 I founded Urban Harvester, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is getting untapped food resources to the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, and pantry. We designed a scalable model that includes education and outreach to bring communities and businesses together.

We don’t have a fleet of trucks or a facility; our goal is simply to connect the dots. We are like a dating service bringing together food and the agencies that need it. Today we are partnering with 211 LA County—a countywide network that includes 49,000 city, county, public assistant, and nonprofit programs–to try to connect to more agencies for our food work. 211 LA County is part of a larger national network of programs that serve 93 percent of the country. Today, this connection work is done personally and locally, but we have built a database and are using technology to build up a system to connect food and agencies that need food at any hour and across the world.

All types of food suppliers are now involved–not just grocery stores but restaurants, food trucks, Starbucks, the South Pasadena Unified School District, a music festival, a temple, a farmers market, and many wonderful food retailers that prefer to donate food quietly. Just a few weeks ago, we proposed and won unanimous passage from the South Pasadena city council of our first resolution: Businesses, instead of disposing of edible extra food that is professionally prepared, are encouraged to connect the food to local agencies. Our goal is to keep taking big steps, albeit one at a time, to help people with their basic needs.

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