Hi. My name is Rosemary Clark. I’m a biologist, an aspiring science fiction author, a gardener, a bicyclist, and I live in El Cerrito, California. I’ve lived in this town since 2011, first as a renter, then since 2019 as a homeowner.
I don’t normally start internet conversations with a detailed biography. Generally, I think the internet is a bit of a dangerous place these days: doxxing, harassment, stalking, misinformation campaigns, and corporate and government surveillance are all rampant problems, particularly in the social media ecosystems we have all been sucked into in one way or another. Some of those social media sites purport to address some of those issues by setting “real name” policies, under the premise that people speaking under their own names may feel a little more social restraint. I haven’t seen much evidence that that’s the case; there’s a whole enormous field of sociological research dedicated to understanding human behaviors on the internet, and the best I can say without dedicating a lot of time to reading is that it appears to be a very complicated topic. My approach to this mess, for most of my life, has been to stay fairly quiet, and mostly stick to spaces where I can be known by a pseudonym.
Unfortunately, there are some times when speaking under one’s own name really starts to feel necessary. We live, as they say, in interesting times. Speaking out—real talk—sometimes involves putting your own skin in the game.
Confession: I’m something of a coward. I hate confrontation. I have anxiety; I feel a sometimes pathological need for people to like me, or at least not be mad at me. Speaking up in any public forum is kind of torturous. As a kid, I withered under any sort of spotlight. It took me many, many years of practice to become even marginally comfortable with public speaking. I had to force myself to train and practice endlessly at conflict management. (Thank goodness for a couple of crummy romantic relationships in college! Deeply unpleasant experiences, but they drove home the importance of open conflict. Now my husband and I have nice healthy fights instead of just leaving things to simmer forever.)
Now, in my 40s, I’m starting to finally feel ready to take the next step and engage in public conversation, to try out new ways to contribute to building the society I dream of. Baby’s-first-activism style.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Well.
It started with some yard signs.
Wait. One more thing before I dive in. I want to make it clear why this blog exists, and what it’s about. I’m not a journalist; I don’t purport to be unbiased. I am just a person with forty years of life experience that has shaped my internal landscape. I have strong political leanings derived from my values: I am, at core, a dreamer, a hopeful person, someone who looks at the flaws and hurts of the world and wants to repair them. I love humanity, despite all our brokenness and cruelty and shortsightedness; I try to see the hurt person underneath the person who hurts others. I try to view us kindly, as the confused animals we are: acting on often maladaptive instincts, baffled by the crazy world around us, just trying to get by. And also, I am a truth-seeker: I think it’s part of the human mission to try to understand the world as it is, not as our egos want it to be, so that we can shape ourselves accordingly into a more just, more equitable people. So my fundamental goal, in this blog, is simply to articulate my own truth, in the hope that it will be useful for someone else to read and reflect on.
That’s some highfalutin language, I know. Getting back to those yard signs.
Back in, oh, January or February this year, my husband and I started seeing yard signs appearing in our neighborhood as we went out on our walks. “Library Tax: A Bad Deal for El Cerrito.” The first signs appeared in front of houses up in the hills, particularly at the really nice houses with views of the bay area. We looked at these signs through the lens of our baseline skepticism, perceiving wealthy people protesting a tax. Really? We thought. Anti-library tax?
As the days went by, we muttered to each other as the signs spread. My husband is more cynical than I am; he’s a good foil to my more pollyannaish tendencies. Neither of us had been tuned into our local political scene, despite living here for nearly 15 years—the city has always seemed like a sleepy suburb, not troubled by much, especially in contrast to either our direct neighboring cities or the national political climate. But a brewing tax fight—before we had even heard anything about a library tax on the upcoming ballot—seemed like it called for some investigation.
So I got on the internet, and did a very basic search. The first result that popped up was for a group styling themselves as “El Cerrito Committee for Responsible Government.” Huh. I clicked, and read a few blog entries. I don’t remember exactly what my first impression was, but something compelled me: I needed to know how the story started. So I clicked back to the very first entries, and started reading.
It took me a couple of weeks to get through the whole thing. Well, I confess, I started skimming after about 25 pages. I’ll talk more about this blog next time—it was genuinely kind of fascinating. But for now, suffice to say, I was really quite interested in what it had to say, but also increasingly skeptical that it was telling the whole story. When it came to the library issue, I felt like it lost the plot altogether. I closed that tab, took a brief look through the “official” pro- and anti-library tax arguments, decided that the Yes arguments felt more coherent to me, and decided to vote yes. We put out a couple yard signs of our own, including a slightly snarky one of my husband’s design, but I didn’t really give it much more thought than that.
Okay.
I have certainly learned a lot more, in these days after the library vote. I’m writing this blog as the chronicle of my resulting explorations—ongoing—into how my sleepy little Bay Area suburb seems to have broken down in the wake of the library tax vote. If you’re reading this, welcome, and I hope you enjoy learning along with me.