I founded the Santa Cruz Bus Rider's Association

My purpose today in writing this news article is to boost my own morale as a vital activist and person who is willing to sacrifice a great deal to my community here in Santa Cruz because I love Santa Cruz, and also because I know, as "I" have learned that "I" am also not only "myself", in fact, "I" am my community, to a large extent, to an extent that I can not fully know or understand at times as well as "I" want to understand.

My people, my community of people- of all kinds, as well as all others, like, for instance, trees, plants, soil, animals, bugs, sky, earth, other activists, people who watch TV, as well as those who do and those who do not have homes or shelter, in the proper sense and others, more or less "abled" people, as well as the wider community of housed people, and pets, all exist in this area together, and I do not leave out the water ones, the lizards, four leggeds, or the birds- all of us, are included in my beloved community, except sometimes it is very hard for me to include executives and management, the rich and the very rich, the technocrats and the democrats, like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the Clintons, and the well to do folks and others who like to dominate, threaten and cut out the rest of us.

When I saw that the harsh cuts were announced formally, threatening our lives, us bus riders, and that the bus driver's and mechanics jobs were threatened, I knew that I would start "activating people", as much as I could by announcing the proposed cuts in order to engender awareness amongst bus riders.

But I went beyond that.

I passionately implored people to understand, beginning in February, what exactly was happening was not mundane, but an attempt to further privatize our public bus transportation system, and I gave political rants to the bus riders as we shared rides, starting in February. I began to agitate, to educate and to do as much outreach as I personally could do to alert bus riders of the impending threat of the cuts and inform people to the larger perspective, as I saw it, as to the real reasons for the cuts. I worked to politicize people.

Later, after the METRO public comment meetings began, and it became clear that multitudes of people, bus riders, as well as bus drivers were turning out to the public comment sessions to speak to the METRO board and management at the sessions that were being strictly regimented and offered, it became fully clear to me that the public was being glad-handed.

Beginning in March and moving into April, I attended every possible meeting of the public with the board, including a Metro Advisory Committee meeting, and I agitated and worked to inform and alert people about what I saw happening. Drivers assisted me and told me about an event at the new transit building. I then disrupted this event to show strong dissent about the cuts, and to my great happiness, other activists were in attendance to protest.

Yet it seemed that the promotional attitude of the management and the board, especially with the professional assistance of Barrow Emerson and Alex Clifford was, "Hey, we and our consultants are doing a great job to figure out what we will need to absolutely cut", while at the same time these two were presenting themselves as professionals, "just doing their jobs", who really cared about the public, while they were actually going to bludgeon the bus routes and the bus rider's lives along with the cuts to the bus routes (and the driver's jobs). The METRO board was on track to cut a whole lot of bus lines. We needed a group to come together to show the power of the bus riders.

So, in April I put out the call to establish a core group of activists, in order to start to build and form a bus rider's association in Santa Cruz. Later on the eighteenth of May, at the Louden Nelson Community, we held our first meeting and other activists showed up and drivers as well as representatives from the driver's union.

The reason that I write this is because the five people that came together in April and early May came together because, I worked to establish this core group so that we could organize together and bring in others in the community to defend our lives against the threats to the bus lines and the driver's jobs.

If I had not done that, we would not have created an effective defense for our community.