RovinCrone: California

Friday, August 20, 2021

SIREN SONG

Sirens sounded from Missouri Flat Road today, and I wondered if they were related to the CalFire helicopters carrying water to the Caldor fire a few miles away. A few people have already been injured in the fire, and panicked residents are beginning to drive out of this area in case they need to evacuate their homes and businesses. The sirens may be on ambulances, police cars, or fire engines.

Being close to a wildfire is certainly a terrifying experience, but it is entirely new to me. Why, then, does it somehow seem so familiar? Then I realized—the sirens brought back the same dread I felt almost thirty years ago, when an earthquake struck the Bay area.

Harold and I lived in Alameda then, only a few miles from the freeway that joined the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I had picked him up from work, and as we were driving home, the car seemed to fall into a ditch, then recover. Harold swore and said something unkind about my driving. Then we saw that all the traffic lights were out. Sirens were sounding in the distance. By the time we got home we realized there must have been an earthquake.

Evening came on, our electricity was off, and we sat in the dark listening to the sirens and wondering how bad the quake had been. Battery-operated radio reports gave only a little information at first, but it sounded as if large parts of San Francisco and East Bay cities might have been leveled. After a few hours, the power came on and we were able to get a few television reports showing newscasters standing precariously on the edges of the broken Bay Bridge and below the collapsed freeway. The sirens continued in the distance. The next day we learned sad news of some Alamedans’ deaths below the freeway.

It was only a few days before recovery began. Bad as the quake had been, it was at least not a repetition of the 1906 disaster. Rebuilding the bridge and freeway completely took years, partly because citizens and planners typically disagreed on how they should look, but it did happen. By about 2000 it was finished. There was even a silver lining from my viewpoint: To provide immediate access to The City from the East Bay, the SeaBees came in to build a temporary ferry terminal not far from our Alameda home. The ferry rapidly became my favorite method of getting to San Francisco, as I could savor the view of the Bay while drinking coffee and writing. Later the ferry was replaced with more elaborate boats, and a permanent terminal was built. Another one in Oakland helped provide the triangle of today’s Alameda-Oakland-San Francisco Ferry, beloved by commuters and the occasional savvy tourist.

Though the destruction of these human-made structures was costly in lives and money, the end result for the infrastructure was acceptable. Few drivers on the freeway and bridge today think about the 1989 collapse, but I can still hear the sirens. Worse, I am reminded of another natural disaster, the destruction of our natural environment occurring not far away from my home in the Sierras now. Thousands of acres of trees and associated communities of plants and animals will come back from the fire eventually, too late for me to see it happen. There is plenty of blame to go around. Human-caused climate change has added to natural cycles of drought and abundant water; logging companies used clear-cutting for many years; then we environmentalists urged too many controls over logging. Among us we destroyed what took thousands of years to create.

Monday, October 31, 2016

DEATH PENALTY

On November 8 we Californians will vote on two conflicting propositions about the death penalty. Proposition 62 would repeal it, 66 would accelerate the process. I plan to vote for repeal, and not because I’m a “bleeding-heart liberal.” I have other reasons:

The older I become, the less I fear death, and realize it is probably not an effective deterrent to crime anyway. The sort of monster who is a serial killer, a rapist of children, or other horrific person may be filled with self-loathing and actually welcome death. Why should we enable their suicide? If someone has committed a crime so heinous that the death penalty is appropriate, then a quick execution is too easy on them. Instead of receiving the death penalty, anyone deserving that punishment should be locked away from the world for their lifetime, where they can slowly contemplate the enormity of their actions and suffer mental anguish.

In California, most of those who have received the death penalty promptly appeal it. The appeal process may continue for years and is extremely costly to the state. Currently we have 741 prisoners on death row. According to a 2011 study by U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, abolishing the death penalty in California would save about a billion dollars every five or six years.[i]

Perhaps most important, juries are sometimes wrong, for a variety of reasons. They may have relied on incomplete evidence, or been swayed by emotional arguments. Since 1973, 156 United States prisoners on death row have been released after DNA or other tests have exonerated them.[ii] (Others’ sentences have been commutated for other reasons, such as irregularities in their trials.) Those freed lost years of their lives, which is bad enough, but they were able to salvage some time; they might have been executed if there hadn’t been a delay after sentencing. If the death penalty is repealed, some innocent lives can be saved.

There are other reasons for repeal, of course. Many people consider the death penalty to be a barbaric practice that should not continue. Though I consider lifetime imprisonment a more fitting punishment, I can sympathize with that viewpoint. Deliberately killing anyone, even the most evil person, is abhorrent in a civilized society. We need to repeal the death penalty.

[i] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/20/local/la-me-adv-death-penalty-costs-20110620.

[ii] Staff Report, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights, 1993, with updates from the Death Penalty Information Center.