“Benicia Our Home” Celebration at Benicia’s Clocktower on June 25
Special to the Benicia Herald, by Lois Kazakoff, June 9, 2023
[Note from BenIndy Contributor Roger Straw: For more about California’s first AAPI Poet Laureate and his understanding of racism and the importance of telling story, see KCRW News LA.]
California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick will headline “Benicia Our Home” on Sunday, June 25 at 3 PM at the Clock Tower.
California’s poet laureate wants you to write about Benicia, maybe in rhyme – but definitely with heart.
“Usually those who speak for a community are politicians or officials but we all have thoughts connected to where we live, grew up and raise a family,” said Lee Herrick, 52, a Fresno City College writing instructor who was appointed state poet laureate in November. “We each have a voice. And there is poetry in everyone.”
Herrick will headline “Benicia Our Home,” an afternoon of poetry, art and song at the Clock Tower on Sunday, June 25, sponsored by the Benicia Public Library. Everyone is invited. To learn more, go to benicialibrary.org/poet/events or email Benicia’s Poet Laureate, Mary Susan Gast at poetlaureatebenicia@gmail.com .
Event flyer – click to enlarge
Benicia is one stop on Herrick’s travels around the state to hear what Californians experience and celebrate. Or what concerns them. Or what they see differently. In April alone, he participated in 27 events.
Poetry can help us explore and celebrate California’s diversity and the range of our experiences through a personal, emotional and social lens, he said. The poet’s imagination can transport us and illuminate the full range of the human condition. California is the most populous state in the country, and we lead in many disciplines, including the literary arts and poetry.
He hopes to bring together the social justice, civic engagement and poetry communities in each town under his platform, “Our California.” Californians will be able to submit their poems at the “Our California” webpage on the California Arts Council’s website when the project launches later this year.
Poetry can help us reflect on how life in our hometown could be different or celebrated more widely. “Change starts with an individual’s imagination,” said Herrick.
His own poetry is rooted in these themes. His 2020 poem, “What I Hear When I Hear You in My Head,” begins: It’s the little whisper, the aggregate sorrow …
Poetry lays bare what we find beautiful and joyous but also the less pleasant human emotions – anger, sadness, fear, grief, he said. “When we are writing, we discover more of who we are.”
As the world sheltered in place in 2020 and health concerns engulfed us, Herrick wrote, “The Birds Outside My Window Sing During a Pandemic:”
What we need has always been inside of us. For some — a few poets or farmers, perhaps — it’s always near the surface. Others, it’s buried. It was in our original design, though — pre-machine, pre-border, pre-pandemic. …
Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate in 2015-17, emerged from the remarkable Fresno poetry scene. That Central Valley city has produced two U.S. Poet Laureates, Juan Felipe Herrera, the nation’s first Latino poet laureate (2015-17), and Philip Levine (2011-12), known as the poet of the working class.
He was named in November to a two-year term as California’s 10th poet laureate and confirmed by the state Senate in May. In announcing the appointment, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “Lee (Herrick)’s dedication to highlighting the diverse experiences of Californians, and making them so accessible through his poetry, makes him a perfect candidate for Poet Laureate. I look forward to his work to inspire communities and individuals across the state through the power of the written word.”
Herrick was born in Daejeon, South Korea, and adopted as an infant by White American parents. He lived in Danville until the family moved to Modesto when he was 8. He has taught at Fresno City College for 26 years and teaches in a master’s of fine arts program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He lives in Fresno with his wife and teenage daughter.
Lois Kazakoff is a member of the Benicia Public Library Board of Trustees.
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Write a ZipOde
Maybe you are a poet and don’t know it? Start small. Write a ZipOde, a poem about a town based on its ZIP code.
Each ZipOde has five lines, with the number of words on each line determined by the numbers of the ZIPcode. Benicia’s ZIP code is 94510.
For example,
I will change into my painting pants and shirt (9 words)
Benicia is a palette (4 words)
Of limitless and gorgeous vistas (5 words)
Yay! (1 word)
[Ooooo] (0 words)
[BenIndy contributor Roger Straw: ‘Benicia Our Home’ at the Clocktower will be incredible – kind of a send-off for my sweetheart of 52 years, Benicia Poet Laureate Mary Susan Gast. Larnie Fox commented on Mary Susan’s poetry and leadership, “Mary Susan has been an amazing presence on the scene here, easing us through insurrections, mass shootings and COVID with compassion and insight.” As to the June 25 event, I can’t believe we ALSO have the California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick coming! And more – Constance Beutel’s song-video will bring Benicians together in an unprecedented way – such positivity as we’ve not seen in my time in Benicia… Mark your calendar now, and plan to attend!]
Click image to enlarge.
BENICIA OUR HOME, JUNE 25 – Mark your calendar now!
Plan now to attend a festive historic event at Benicia’s Clocktower on June 25th at 3 PM. Benicians and friends will gather to celebrate our homeplace, to tell its story and join in song. This free event sponsored by the Benicia Public Library will feature a very special guest, California’s Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, and we will hear from our outgoing Poet Laureate, Mary Susan Gast. Visual artwork portraying life in Benicia will be on display, and we will hear “ZipOdes 94510,” short poems by Benician residents. A super highlight will be the premier showing of “Benicia Our Home,” a film portraying scenes of Benicia accompanied by over 200 Benicians in song. Don’t miss this!
Reserve the date – June 25 – and plan to meet at the Clock Tower at 3PM.
Daily Mail: Louisville bank shooting is America’s 146th mass shooting in 2023 – more than the number of days so far this year – as nation braces to hit record
The U.S. is suffering a horrific and increasing level of gun violence over the last three weeks. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) has become the nation’s best source of information on mass shootings. These numbers came from the GVA on April 30 listing mass shootings over the previous 20 days.
The numbers can’t begin to tell the stories of heartache and loss among families and friends and whole communities. But the numbers do tell the story of a nation in crisis. I put the details into a spreadsheet format:
Click on image above to enlarge. Or click here to download in spreadsheet format. Click here to go to GVA for detailed links to each incident.)
In 2006, James Feldermann got hired as a trainee at a refinery in Martinez, California, in the Bay Area. It was hard work, with 12-hour-minimum shifts, but Feldermann came to excel at it. He learned how to isolate pipes and vessels, load railcars with molten sulfur and ammonia, and helm an industrial control panel. In time, he rose to the position of head operator at the Marathon Petroleum site. The job paid well, and he enjoyed it. He expected to stay until retirement.
On a Friday afternoon in July 2020, Feldermann was abruptly summoned to an all-hands Zoom meeting. While some of his colleagues struggled to get the audio to work, Feldermann received a phone call from his union representative. “I didn’t actually hear management tell us that they were laying us off,” he told me. The plant was being shut down, as the rise of work-from-home and the spread of electric vehicles depressed Californians’ demand for gasoline. Feldermann and his co-workers would be out of a job in 90 days.
The United States is embarking on an epochal transition from fossil fuels to green energy. That shift is necessary to avert the worst outcomes of climate change. It also stands to put hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people like Feldermann out of work. The result could be not only economic pain for individual families, but also the devastation of communities that rely on fossil-fuel extraction and a powerful political backlash against green-energy policies.
A pathbreaking new study[BenIndy editor: see indent below] shows just how real the damage could be, absent policies to soften the economic blow. Virginia Parks, a professor at UC Irvine, and Ian Baran, a doctoral student, tracked the consequences of the Marathon shutdown in near-real time, getting more than 40 percent of the workers to return surveys and a smaller group to sit for interviews. They found that, more than a year after the shutdown, one in five Marathon workers was unemployed. Their earnings had declined sharply, with the median hourly wage of employed workers plunging from $50 to $38. Some workers were earning as little as $14 an hour. And those new gigs came with more dangerous working conditions.
To prevent other workers from experiencing the same, the Biden White House has promised to pursue a “just transition,” employing policies to ensure “new, good-paying jobs for American workers and health and economic benefits for communities.” But the green-energy transition is already underway. And it is not clear that it will be just.
The legendary American union leader Tony Mazzocchi pioneered the concept of a just transition a half century ago. Some industries are too toxic for society, he argued. But to shut them down in a way that punishes the workers in those industries, or the places where those industries are concentrated, would be unjust.
Just-transition policies are not merely about bailing out blue-collar folks. They are meant to defray the cost of having whole communities fall into persistent economic distress: a loss of social cohesion, people living shorter and sicker lives, the rise of “deaths of despair,” the growth of right-wing populism. They are also meant to generate political support for green policies, or at least dampen any backlash. Without them, “you risk dissuading future efforts that are for the societal good,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental-studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, told me. “If we’re doing things that are for the benefit of society but screw over a bunch of people, that’s not a societal good.”
These policies have worked. The Ruhr region in western Germany, for example, once produced coal, iron, and steel, with extractive and heavy industry employing a majority of the region’s workers. The German government, labor unions, and industrial leaders came to a series of agreements to diversify its economy, providing payments for displaced workers and making investments in service-and-knowledge businesses. Employment in coal mining in the region went from 473,000 in 1957 to zero by the end of 2018. The area lost nearly 1 million production jobs but gained nearly 1 million service jobs.
Yet it is hard to identify many, if any, just transitions in the United States. Appalachia lost its coal jobs and gained an opioid epidemic. Detroit deindustrialized and fell into poverty and disrepair. The decision to open up trade with China sent millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, and policy makers did little to create any in their place. Now the planned obsolescence of the fossil-fuel industry threatens to create new Rust Belts in regions economically dependent on extraction, such as the Permian Basin, in Texas, or the Bakken Formation, in Montana and North Dakota.
The problem is threefold. First, the United States does not invest heavily in industrial policy or place-based policy compared with some of its rich-country peers, though the Biden administration has started to push billions of dollars into both. If coal is leaving a region, Washington historically is not sending anything else in. Second, the country has lower rates of unionization and a much thinner safety net than other wealthy nations, making workers more vulnerable to the effects of mine closures and plant shutdowns. Third, the Republican Party tends to reject the premise that the country needs to move away from fossil-fuel production at all, making them a weak partner in setting up just-transition plans.
No wonder the Marathon shutdown went the way it did. John Bayer, a safety specialist, lost his job at the site, as did his two brothers. He told me that he was not offered any form of government help, aside from unemployment insurance. Bayer, who has two kids, sent out about 50 applications and received just two callbacks. He ended up at an agriscience firm that nearly matched his Marathon wage but provided fewer opportunities for overtime. “I ended up with a $60,000-a-year pay cut,” he told me.
James Feldermann wound up taking a job based in Reno, Nevada, for $17 an hour less than he was making at Marathon. He rented a small studio apartment there and spent months driving 200 miles back to the Bay Area every weekend to see his wife and son.
Both the state of California and the Biden administration are in the process of developing plans for a just transition to green energy. Those plans were too late for the Marathon employees. Many labor leaders, academics, and politicians think those plans are almost certain to be too little for fossil-fuel workers losing their jobs in the near future.
On paper, the challenge seems straightforward. The United States has roughly 120,000 oil-and-gas workers and 40,000 coal miners. The green-energy sector is adding at least that many jobs every year. Supply, meet demand. Why not create a job-matching service for those laid off; provide them with wage subsidies, transition assistance, and relocation funds; and watch the country’s emissions turn from smoke-gray to vapor-white?
A few reasons. For one, fossil-fuel companies employ about 1.7 million workers in the U.S., not 160,000, once you factor in all the labor not directly involved in extraction and refining. It takes a lot of workers to transport fuel, manufacture secondary products from it, and power communities with it. And it makes little sense to transition many of those workers directly into green-energy jobs. Oil-and-gas gigs tend to pay far more than solar and wind do. And workers in extractive industries tend to develop valuable, specialized skill sets, as Feldermann did. Their technical chops would be wasted selling rooftop solar systems, and their salaries would get cut in half.
The government also faces the challenge of supporting whole communities dependent on fossil-fuel extraction, not just individual workers. “Fossil-fuel companies tend to be dominant employers where they are located,” Michaël Aklin, a professor of economics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, told me. “When they shut down, the central node in that local economy disappears.” The consequences ripple out to the businesses and institutions that rely on the money those workers used to spend and the taxes they used to pay.
The crux of the Biden administration’s plan for a just transition thus far is a policy granting tax incentives to businesses investing in “energy communities.” In the long term, that might encourage companies to locate warehouses and jobs in the places where oil, gas, and coal facilities are closing. But incentives are, well, just incentives. What if private businesses choose not to locate in certain parts of Louisiana or North Dakota, despite the tax breaks on the table? What if they create jobs years after a shutdown has done its damage? What happens to places where no business wants to invest?
At this point, neither Sacramento nor Washington has developed a robust plan to reach out and help oil-and-gas workers one by one. That’s a necessary component, UC Irvine’s Virginia Parks told me. The government, she argued, should provide financial support to cover the gap between workers’ pre- and post-layoff wages, as well as aiding workers close to retirement. Legislators should set up programs to certify the workers’ skills so that outside employers can see just how qualified they are. Finally, the government should provide retraining and job-match services.
Last week, Tracy Scott, the president of the United Steelworkers Local 5, the union representing the Marathon employees, drove me around the closed refinery complex. It sits on emerald-green marshland near where the Carquinez Strait empties into San Pablo Bay. When we visited, the heavy machinery once used to turn sour crude into gas and petrochemicals was surrounded by a superbloom of California poppies and wild mustard. We both remarked on how beautiful it was. A little later, Scott told me that refinery workers tend to die young, and rarely get to take advantage of the retirement packages the union negotiates for them.
This place does not deserve to be burdened with this refinery, I thought. And these people do not deserve to suffer for its closure.
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