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A Prosecutor and a Protector

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It is easy to be a cynical pessimist who believes that the state of our nation, our state, and our communities is awful and will never get any better. Cynicism asks so little of us; we can sit back and complain about how bad things are without even needing to stand up from our chairs, or put down our phones. It is harder to have faith in our ability to make things better, and to go out and work to improve our communities, but that does not mean that it is hard. In fact, there is one sure, easy thing that we can do to try to make things better for our neighbors, our friends, our families, ourselves, and our children: we can vote, and on June 5th people all across California will vote to decide who will represent us in Washington and in Sacramento, but we also get to choose who will defend us, define our values, and will seek justice on our behalf by voting for the District Attorney of Contra Costa County. And there is only one person who has a proven track record of siding with the powerless against the powerful, of a firm commitment to fairness, a decades-long dedication to and love of the law, and who has the vital experience that means that she will not have to learn on the job (because she already has the job), and that is Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton.

After 22-years of experience as a judge and with universal respect within the legal community, DA Becton was appointed to her position by the County Board of Supervisors last year and entrusted to turn around a DA’s office that had been plagued by corruption, incompetence, and low morale. DA Becton made history before she even set foot in her new office, as she took office last year as both the first woman and the first African American to serve as DA in the then-167-year history of Contra Costa County, but she did not simply rest on her historic achievement, instead she hit the ground running, creating a new culture in the office from day one, and working to restore public confidence in her office, and rebuilding the office’s reputation. She has made the position more transparent and accountable to the people, and showed that she is brave enough to admit mistakes, and humble enough to work to correct them, putting honesty above her own personal political gain.

As DA, Diana sets the priorities of her office, deciding which crimes to prosecute, and sentences to suggest. It means that DA Becton is in position to help address mass-incarceration by directing resources to deal with violent crimes over drug offenses, keeping our communities and our families safe while also addressing the fact that California currently has 160,000 people in our prison system, of which 75% are African American or Latino. This has led minority communities to view District Attorneys as, ‘the enemy,’ which is something that DA Becton is working to change by doing community outreach, prioritizing diversion programs, and countering immigrant-communities reluctance to report crimes committed against them to law enforcement because of fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Diana is for fair, equal treatment for victims as well as for those accused of crimes, for dealing with the homeless and those who are mentally ill with compassion and respect, and for keeping families together by fighting against setting exorbitant, unaffordable bail amounts that keep many who have not been convicted of any crime in prison because they do not have the money to pay.

We have a real chance to grab this moment before us of promise, and hope, and to use it to build a fairer, safer, and more just Contra Costa County. We need simply to choose vote for and support Diana Becton, optimism and action over cynicism and apathy, and we can be the best possible version of our community. We don’t have the luxury to take this moment for granted and decide that we would indeed rather do nothing. We have a very rare opportunity here with DA Becton, and we need to vote her a full term as our District Attorney, and work with her to show that we don’t need to choose to be safe OR just, but that we can be both. We need a DA who understands that the role is both a prosecutor and a protector, and who won’t tells us that we’re incapable of being more than just one thing, and that we can only focus on negative, punitive measures and not on positive or preventative ones: Diana Becton is that DA. It took us 168-years to get to this moment, so let us choose action and vote for a prosecutor and a protector, because we could wait 168-more years and never see a chance this great or a candidate as qualified and skilled as DA Diana Becton.

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It Ain’t Over ‘Till California Says it is

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The fight for the Democratic Nomination is over! Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has defeated Senator Bernie Sanders, and can now shift all of her attention to her general election opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump! At least that is what the national media has been saying, loudly, for months now. If the media is correct, then I suppose it means that Bernie is engaged in a lavish performance art piece for the glorification of his own ego, and his supporters are being played for fools or are in on the joke. Even as I write this, thousands of Bernie supporters are pounding pavement, knocking on doors, and calling people all across the state of California in a supposedly doomed, comic attempt to win the state’s Primary this Tuesday, June 7th. But there is at least one person who is certainly not laughing about Bernie’s chances this Tuesday: Secretary Clinton herself! Hillary has been crisscrossing the state for the last several days in a last effort to win a state that is slipping from her once firm grasp. Hillary Clinton is here fighting for votes because she knows that no election is ever over until California has had its say.

California is by far the most populous state in the United States of America, and is estimated to be home to over 39 million human beings (Texas is second with just shy of 27.5 million, while the nation itself is home to an estimated 323 million people, making it the third most populous on earth). To try to put California’s size in perspective, if it were its own nation, it would rank as the 35th largest on the planet, and home to more people than Canada. If California were an independent nation, it would have the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world according to Gross Domestic Product, having a larger economy than India and is either just behind, or actually ahead of (according to different sources) France, a nation inhabited by over 20 million more people than California. And yet, in spite of our wealth, power, and population, national politics and national politicians often ignore us (the Republican approach), or take us for granted (The Democratic approach). Californians are tired of being marginalized in national affairs. Bernie’s popularity and his chance to win the Golden State are in part because he’s taken the all-too-rare step of actually listening to what we have to say.

Bernie has not promised to fix everything overnight or by himself. Instead he has reminded us of the power that we have as a people to make our state, our nation, and our world a better place. Failing to use our power has allowed money in politics to clog and calcify the arteries of democracy. Bernie, like a surgeon, is asking for our help in performing a bypass surgery by way of political revolution. If we continue to tolerate the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of only a small group of wealthy oligarchs, then eventually the patient, “the American democracy,” will die.

There is no way that our nation can remain a democracy when the people of California are solely addressed by national leaders when our Primary comes up, only to return to being politically irrelevant again the day afterwards. Treating 39+ million people as an afterthought is a dangerous way to run things. And as if ignoring us politically for all but a few weeks every four years was not insulting enough, the national media is now telling us that our votes are meaningless because the race is already over. Really? Must they rob us of what limited voice we already have?

Bernie is here, and so is Hillary, but only one of them is saying that things cannot stand as they currently are, where the nation and much of the world looks to us for technology, entertainment, diversity, science, music, and food (among other things), but turns away from us when we try to have a say in larger issues. But Bernie hears us, and the national media is going to have to sell its ‘California doesn’t matter’ story elsewhere, because on Tuesday we’re going to speak up together, and the whole world will have no choice but to listen.