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Deborah J. Brasket

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Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: Activism

The Personal & Political, Past & Present

18 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by deborahbrasket in Memoir, Writing

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Activism, community advocate, labor organizer, living wage, memoir, part-time teaching, personal, Politics, social justice, vocation

America Today | Thomas Hart Benton | 2012.478a-j | Work of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
America Today by Thomas Hart Benton

Years ago, in what seems like another life time, I wrote a political column called “Taking Care of Labor” in the local daily newspaper. It was in direct response, or opposition, to another column called “Taking Care of Business” written by my nemesis, Andy Caldwell. Interestingly, Caldwell is now running for the seat of an old colleague of mine, Salud Carbajal, who is the current US Congressman for our District.

I didn’t know either man when I began writing the column. I was teaching as an adjunct professor or part-time instructor at three different colleges and universities at the time. I was what was known then as a “Freeway Flyer,” someone who pieces together a full-time living on part-time wages. Part-time instructors were all the rage back then and no doubt they still are.

Colleges and universities could save tons of money hiring teaching staff on a part-time basis, where they didn’t have to provide health care or offices, or pay for “office hours” to advise students. Instead, we part-timers held office hours in libraries, or on campus benches, or even from the tailgates of our cars when we needed to hand out study materials from files we kept in back seats. Indeed, we only got paid for the actual hours we spent in class, not for the considerable prep time before class or for the evaluations and grading of work after class. But this exploitation of part-time labor wasn’t confined to higher education. It was, and still is, rampant throughout all industries.

That’s when I entered politics, to help right this wrong. My column was my first step on this road. I also was involved in creating a state-wide association for part-time community college instructors so we could lobby for change at the state level. I served as the communications director, writing and editing a newspaper for members that was distributed to every college campus across the state. Eventually I led an effort to organize a union for part-time instructors at one of the colleges where I worked. As its first president and contract negotiator, we were able to finally get increased wages, paid office hours (no offices however), and some limited health insurance.

After all this, however, I became so disenchanted with higher education that I left it to work in the nonprofit field. This is where I met Carbajal. He was the board president of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SBCAN) when I joined. He left soon after to become a county board supervisor, and I eventually became the board president, and then the Director, of SBCAN, advocating on social justice and environmental issues at the city and county level. My column evolved to take up that work–again, in opposition to Caldwell’s columns. We butted heads often when advocating on opposite sides of issues at Board of Supervisor hearings.

Once Andy and I appeared back to back for interviews on a local radio station. He challenged me to a public debate. I had to laugh it off. I knew, and my board buddies knew, that he would have behaved in much the same manner as Trump treated Biden at that first debate. We weren’t willing to give him that show.

When my husband retired in 2011 and we moved to a new county, I also retired. I had become disenchanted with political advocacy and sought a creative life. At the core of my being I had always thought of myself as a writer, and now I would have the time to pursue that. I’ve managed to stay outside politics, or on its fringe all these years. I could well afford to because I lived in a state and county that “leaned left” as I did. I was happy and relieved to let others lead in local politics.

But it does seem strange now as I watch TV ads by my former nemesis, Caldwell, and my former colleague, Carbajal, vying for the same seat in Congress. Both still actively fighting the good fight, as they see it, while I sit on the sidelines. One of our SBCAN board members was a political icon in Santa Barbara County well into her nineties. She would attend our board meetings, as well as a dozen others in her walker. She was actively engaged in politics until the day she died. I fear she would be disappointed in me.

There was a time when she and other colleagues hoped that I would take Carbajal’s path, running for a seat on city council or county board of supervisors. I was sorry to have to disappoint them. But having sat through so many of those meetings, I knew I would be bored to tears to take that on full-time. It’s not where my passion lay.

I do not regret that choice, but it’s interesting sometimes to look back and see where we’ve been and where it led us. And sometimes I think I could have taken up a larger pen, even in retirement, to advocate on the issues that most touch my heart–a living wage, affordable housing, an end to homelessness, decriminalization of drug use, and increased services and treatment programs for substance abuse and mental health.

Perhaps I’m writing all this to assuage a guilt I still sometimes feel, having abandoned colleagues and causes I had once fought so fervently with and for. Looking back, I can honestly say I’d “been there, done that.” I’d hoped this would reassure me in my choice to go another direction now.

But it also reminds me how the good fight never really seems to end. Certainly not in one lifetime. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Inch by slow inch.

I am deeply grateful to all who are still actively engaged in helping to bend that mighty arc.

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Saving, and Savoring, the World

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by deborahbrasket in Memoir, Spirituality, Writing

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Activism, Community, fighting against the odds, perseverance, social justice, solidarity, spiritual renewal

Photo DJBrakset IMG_3177I spent many years as a community activist working on social justice and environmental issues.  Part of that work included writing a column for a local newspaper.

One of these columns appears below, which addresses the difficulty of persevering during difficult times. The current economic uncertainty, recent tragic shootings, and natural disasters, all coming around the holiday season, are so challenging.  What renews us and keeps us going? How do we continue trying save a world that seems in constant crisis?

SPIRITUAL RENEWAL FOR ACTIVISTS

Cc photo Kevin Steel on flickr-28912555-originalOn a cold, rainy winter afternoon we gathered in front of the grocery store where I formerly did my shopping.

Along with others in the community, I had come to support the striking grocery workers in their long dark hours, struggling to preserve their livelihood and health care, their homes and the welfare of their families.

CC photo by Justmakeit on flickr-2854066667-originalForming a circle of solidarity, we marched and chanted slogans to raise our spirits and strengthen our wills.

As we walked I watched moving across the faces of those who marched a heart-wrenching mixture of emotions:  weariness from the long weeks of vigil, determination not to give in and give up, hope that new negotiations would end the strike, fear that all their effort might come to nothing.

I couldn’t help wondering, what keeps them coming back here day after day, week after week, month after month?  What sustains them in their struggle?

CC photo by Ives flickr-4060021721-originalThey aren’t the only ones battling against formidable odds. Scattered across the country so many people are fighting their own Goliaths of greed, corruption, prejudice, indifference, apathy, despair.

How do we keep going, day after day, year after year, in our quest to help the homeless, feed the hungry, protect the weak, end the violence, preserve the environment, keep the peace?

When the obstacles seem so overwhelming, the task so huge, the progress so slow, what keeps us going?  What feeds our strength, nourishes our vision, renews our will?  What sustains us in our work?

Cc Photo by El Struthio flickr-2814433143-originalRecently our family watched The Return of the King, the final film in Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series.

What I saw depicted on the screen echoed in heroic and epic dimensions what I see happening all over the world, as well as throughout our own small community: small bands of people of conscience with courage and commitment, loyalty and love, strength and humility, taking up the gauntlet of what seems an insurmountable challenge, willing to sacrifice personal gain, comfort, and safety in the struggle to promote the common good.

Cc photo by Katy Silberger flickr-3503359255-originalWilliam F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, once wrote:

“I think we who work for justice and come face to face regularly with its negation are at risk of losing that which animates all healthy beings: the capacity to respond to the graciousness draping the world in colors vivid and electric, the warmth of the sun, a lover’s touch.  If we neglect to notice these, why attend to anything else?  E. B. White said, ‘Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it.  This makes it hard to plan the day.’  But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it?  In a way, the savoring must come first.”

Photo DJBrasket Rainiy day in Big SurPerhaps in the end, our struggle is not so much about trying to save someone or something, as about savoring what is good and beautiful in each individual, in the world around us, and in our selves.

Even in the Tolkien film, what causes us to champion the warriors of the Middle Earth is the sense that there is something precious and noble in the world of men and hobbits worth the saving and the savoring.  When all seemed lost and doomed, what kept these warriors moving forward was returning again and again to that sense of savoring what must not be lost.

In teaching composition, we sometimes talk about the recursiveness of writing–how we must return again and again to what inspired us to write in the first place in order to persist in the difficult task of writing.   Often what inspires us to write is not a fully fleshed idea, but something nebulous and fuzzy, a “felt-sense” of what we want to express, something important, even urgent, yet not clearly seen or understood.  During the writing process, we return again and again to that “felt sense” to clarify and strengthen our ideas.  Without this felt-sense, we sometimes flounder, run adrift, lose interest, or give up.

Photo DJBrasket IMG_2748As activists in promoting positive change, we are in a sense in the process of rewriting the world.  To persist in our work, we must return again and again to that “felt-sense” of what inspires us.  Within the desire to save the world is the felt-sense that, despite all our faults and failures, there is something beautiful and good in the world, in humanity, in each and every one of us, worth the saving because worth the savoring.

The savoring not only comes first, but the savoring is what sustains us.

 

Adapted from the essay “Spiritual Renewal for Activists” by Deborah J. Brasket, first printed in the Santa Maria Times, January 9, 2004.

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After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

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