Author: Anna Daniels

Originally posted September 29, 2010

By Anna Daniels

“Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.” … “What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.” Phyllis Schlafly

“Schlafly’s discussion reveals a paradox. She was able to have it all: family and career. And she did it by fighting those who said they were trying to get it all for her.…” Pia de Solenni

When I walked into the unisex bathroom at the Livingroom coffeehouse, I deftly threw a kung fu kick, successfully lowering the toilet seat from its upright position with a soul satisfying BANG! accompanied by my hissed words “Here’s to you Phyllis Schlafly!”

Schlafly spear headed the anti-Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) movement in 1974, maintaining that the ERA’s passage would lead to compulsory military service for women, same sex marriage and (drum roll please…) public unisex bathrooms!

Last week, on November 28, Bob Dorn’s wife Deborah sent a brief email to the San Diego Free Press editors:

Very sad news….Bob had severe heart attack… basically cardiac arrest after a wonderful evening at a jam where he played with friends…..he passed today in a place he loved .Didn’t suffer at all….so sorry to tell you guys this way.
Love
Deborah

The news blindsided the SDFP editors who have been winding down our beloved publication, with all the emotions that engenders in each one of us. Bob’s death feels like a particularly incomprehensible blow, yet another grievous loss. We had imagined that our community would remain vital and connected after we ceased publishing, and then Deborah’s email informed us that our community had been diminished. Just like that.

We have become the barbarians at the gate
By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

As if ripping children from their parents’ arms, locking them up in cages or sending them to facilities on the other side of the country weren’t the absolute low point of the Trump administrations response to immigrants seeking asylum, we are now tear gassing children.

Let that sink in for a moment. We are tear gassing children, who were reported as running screaming and crying from the tear gas canisters shot into Mexico, a foreign country, by US Border Patrol. (Imagine this situation reversed, with Mexico lobbying canisters into the US.)

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

For the children of steel
The Atlantic recently ran an article about the long term impacts of the now largely defunct steel industry in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Braddock resident Tony Buba has produced a short documentary about the environmental racism that has created an overlooked health crisis among residents in the area, particularly among African Americans who were segregated in neighborhoods closest to the mills. The incidences of cancer and lung disease are shocking.

For those of us who lived in any one of the mill towns dotting the Monongahela River (Mon Valley) in southwestern Pennsylvania and lost loved ones to those diseases,

Time for Democrats to go on the offense
By Anna Daniels

Remember how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Merrick Garlanded Obama’s Supreme Court pick? Let’s do McConnell one better:

Any Trump SCOTUS pick is void while he and his campaign are under a criminal investigation for obstruction and conspiracy against the United States.

Imagine the scenario in which criminal charges are brought by Mueller and the case ends up before the Supreme Court. Now imagine the loyalty oath which Trump would extract in some form from his pick for Supreme Court justice to replace Anthony Kennedy. Any question in your mind that Trump not only has his thumb but both feet on the scale?

“If you can sail to Catalina,” someone once said to me, “you can sail around the world.” — From Where We Sail

Editor: Here’s a wonderful review by Anna Daniels of the sailing memoirs of our friend and Point Loman Dianne Lane, who recently released her book, From Where We Sail.

By Anna Daniels

The road trip is a well-established genre in America’s literary cannon, and Point Loman Dianne Lane’s recently released memoir From Where We Sail is an engaging narrative within this literary tradition. The full title of the book includes the additional description: A Family’s Six and a Half Year Journey Around the World on Sorcery.

By Anna Daniels/ San Diego Free Press

When Teresa Gunn performs her one woman show Teresa Gets a Boyfriend at City College’s Saville Theatre on Saturday, February 24, she will take on the universal and oftentimes worn themes of looking for love, finding love and trying to keep love.

Creative storytelling makes old stories new and Teresa Gunn is a consummate storyteller.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

Dylan Thomas

Editor’s Note: Susan Taylor, who wrote gardening columns for the OB Rag and San Diego Free Press, passed in mid-December.

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

Susan Taylor began writing columns about gardening for the OB Rag and San Diego Free Press in February of 2014. The biography that she provided to append to the end of her articles is quintessential Susan—direct, spirited and humorous. It deftly conveys details of an intriguing past, establishes the commitments of her heart and intellect and reflects her whimsical optimism about the future.

By Anna Daniels

The response to Trump’s total moral failure to reckon with what happened in Charlottesville last Saturday prompted an immediate response from citizens all over the country. Over 700 rallies and marches were held in the aftermath, including here in San Diego.

Also in San Diego, the Horton Plaza pavement plaque commemorating the Confederacy was removed–quickly. According to the petition that was circulated yesterday

“It is possible to be in debt, to be lovelorn, and to be racist. They are not mutually exclusive.”

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

The recent shooting rampage at the La Jolla Crossroads apartment complex in University City left one person dead and seven persons wounded. This is indisputable.

We also know that the dead victim and wounded were all African Americans and the shooter, who was subsequently shot by the police, was white.

Local news coverage of the event has unsurprisingly focused on the possible motives for San Diego’s scene of American Carnage.

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

Who knew that the Cerutti Mastodon site along SR54 in San Diego may be “the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas”? And what does that actually mean?

San Diego has been a rich source of paleontological discoveries. A 300,000 year old mammoth was excavated during the construction of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in downtown San Diego. Additional excavation ten feet below the skull and tusks of the mammoth revealed the 500,000 year old skeleton of a California Gray Whale.

Editor: The following is a retelling of how the San Diego communities of Barrio Logan and City Heights fought CalTrans and the local political machine to save their neighborhoods. (Originally published April 24, 2013.)

Resistance, Vision and Community

By Anna Daniels

During the month of April, San Diego Free Press has been providing extensive coverage of Barrio Logan. Much of that coverage has focused upon Chicano Park–its history, its national historical designation and its deep spiritual and community connections.