I was raised in reactionary New Hampshire (“Live Free Or Die”!), with regular forays across the river to William Allen White’s “social game preserve that is Vermont.” Punctuated by two stints away for good behavior, in Holland and in London, it is now nearly 40 years since I left there. That land has turned 180-degrees from NE-style libertarian Right, to bedroom-community Left. And while I have not been there to witness the reversal, that possibility, manifest, never ceases to amaze. As an adult I have lived in only the BIGGEST of cities, all north of the magnolia curtain including Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York and Montréal; the last, longest and least favorite relocation was west and downward:  Los Angeles.

This blog was started as a sort of “I-statement” about my observations and experiences navigating LAUSD, from which my two children have now graduated. One has since graduated from a private university, the other still attends public. There was a time during this journey of exploration into privatization of the Commons, when I did not comprehend the difference.

Archived here under LAEdX are articles I wrote for a periodical focused on Education politics with my friend, LA StreetsBlog editor and fellow sometime, small-town pol, Damien Newton.

Also archived are my newsletters to CA Assembly District 54 (AD54) Democratic Party constituents. The county “central committees” of California’s political parties are elected by AD. I am not the assembly member! But I am an elected representative to LAC’s Democratic Central Committee (LACDP) from the 54th District. And I have been authoring newsletters to try to explain what the heck this is all about. I had truthfully never heard of the LACDP before being elected to it in March, 2020. I bet most of you have not either, even if you happened to vote for me. (And thanks for that, BTW).

Most, though not all and not all in the same place, of these essays have appeared online in CityWatchLA, LAProgressive, LAEducationExaminer or PeoplesWorld.

I wash plastic bags, mother hens and occasionally dance around the kitchen to Barachois. It is quite true that however hard we run we all do wind up pretty much in the same place. It shouldn’t stop the effort, and the astute will notice slight shifts. Life is long. Unless it isn’t. Try to Be Kind.

~ from whence, “Red Queen in LA”?

-excerpts from Through The Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll:

“For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last. ‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played – all over the world – if this is the world at all, you know.  Oh, what fun it is!  How I wish I was one of them!  I wouldn’t mind being a pawn, if only I might join – though of course I should ‘Like’ to be a Queen, best.’

“Alice never could quite make out, in thinking over afterward, how it was that they began:  all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster! but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.  The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.”

see also:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_%28Through_the_Looking-Glass%29