[Alumni-chat] Legal Fund Needs - by Yazz Allen '66

[Travis Sanford (travissanford at msn.com)]

Wow... being in the Pacific Daylight Time Zone leaves me way behind.

What I am discouraged by is not the personal acrimony and animosity, I have never truly believed that people of goodwill can work everything out because I find that very few people have much in the way of goodwill. I do believe that all organizations suffer idealogical and politcal struggles to define themselves and frequently the wealthy and powerful win those fights.  How much harder then,  for Antioch where wealth and power are a requirement for survival and we have developed a critique of wealth that some maintain for the rest of their lives and some either lose entirely or it evolves toward pragmatic acceptance of post-scarcity capitalism if not an outright embrace of the inequality and injustice that system employs.

Seems to me its a matter of scale and therefore not one of purity. Is it possible for anyone who drives a car on a daily basis can not claim to be anti-capitalist or an environmentalist, let alone an eco-anarcho-collectivist? We can claim to be purer than others because we don't like the system that more or less forces us to drive everyday. Yet how many make the sacrafice? In the Northwest the Toyota Prius Hybrid is the number 2 selling car. Period. Across all vehicle classes the Prius is number one in new car sales. Oregon and Washington have just passed Renewable Portfolio Standards for electric utilities and everyone here likes to hug and kiss and pat ourselves on the back for how green we are. In fact a Prius is still an internal combustion engine and it burns gasoline and the plethora of vinyl and plastics that make the car light are all petroleum derivatives and (at least in Stumptown) almost everyone of them has some kind of environmental sticker on them. RPS standards ignore
the fact that windpower is intermittant at best and that the nation lacks the infrastructure for transmission and storage of a resource that only works 33% of the time. Etc.

Long winded point, I don't dis David for being relatively rich. I don't dis David for being a property developer building some gorgeous houses, I don't even dis David for giving money to Repulicans ( I myself will be voting to re-elect Gordon Smith to the senate ) or being involved in criminal justice. These are all activities that can have positive side-effects and are time specific (people change). I do dis David for not caring a whit about the faculty and staff of the college and I think he believes they are in fact part and parcel of the "problem" at Antioch. It does get tetchy when a real estate developer proposes real estate development as part of the solution, but I am not a developer but also think some creative leasing of the land assets would be good for revenue (starting with leasing the crematorium to a back office credit processing firm or some other such company that needs 65Ksqft). It is not neccesairly a conflict of interest for David to talk about what is apparently
his area of expertise. I remember when Robert Davis came to Antioch, one of my best friends ripped on him about Seaside being a gated community to let wealth whites escape from blacks and for using plans by Leon Krier an architect who wrote some questionable words about the architecture of Rudolph Hess. Robert Davis is now doing a low income housing project in Santa Fe or Taos. 

But Alan I agree w/you and have been yelling from the rooftops that just because I want to Antioch in the 1990s does not mean my education was less than pre-Strike folks, just different.