Flea Season

I know I’ve been off my turf, out of my tree talking about teachers and politicos. It’s not my beat, I couldn’t help myself I’m a low budget lobbyist a social justice junky. You can take the blow-hard out of Berkeley but you can’t take the Berkeley out of the blow-hard.

Speaking of my hippie dippy roots I’ve reached that point in my mid-life crisis where liberals like myself start to wear only shades of purple. As a middle aged dumpy white woman I feel the need to express my interconnectedness to all the species of the planet and the rich native American tradition and culture which I have no real connection to but which I feel I can speak to anyway. Toward realizing my highly evolved and spiritual identity, I have been given an animal name, Pulex irritans, or just “flea” for those of you who don’t speak Latin.

You know the syndrome, I’ve heard Highland physician’s describe it: “Berkeleyitis.” It’s that overdeveloped since of self-importance and self-righteousness that can make us liberals less fun than a bar full of Mormons. See that’s the challenge with us liberals, we all agree but we can’t get along. That’s the great challenge of the Medical Center; with a bad budget we fight between ourselves about whose work is more important. What’s “non-essential” who’s “unproductive.”

As a whiny white woman I can blame and bicker with the poise and stamina of an Olympic athlete. Unfortunately, my self-righteous funk got rudely interrupted by the crisis that threatens to eat Oakland, murder city. We’re close to fifty murders this year and lots of other people shot up and coming to ACMC. At Highland my friends and co-workers have lost children, friends and family, it’s so sad. We have obituaries posted all over. You work with someone for over ten years and you don’t see a picture of their child until they’re gone. These are kids; we should be collecting money for Girl Scout cookies, not funerals. So if the Board of Supervisors, think now is the right time for the Medical Center to cut services and start giving the county money, they’re crazy! The Medical Center’s deficit is “debt” to the county and no one even showed us an IOU. Look you bloodsuckers we got a “situation” here, take it from me, I’m “the flea.”