Dear readers,
Turn these pages and you will find the same story told six ways. County supervisors want more guns in county buildings and fewer books in county libraries. A grassroots group of community volunteers meet people on L Street where they have been displaced and released into a city they’ve never been. A Central Valley congressional incumbent voted to strip $880 billion from Medicaid. McClatchy cut the reporters who would have told you: this is an attack on our rights. Not one blow but a steady narrowing of what we can read, where we can walk, who gets care and what we are allowed to know.
You’ll read in the Measure S article that when supervisors refused to let voters decide how their own sales tax is spent, ordinary people gathered 32,000 signatures, survived a delay tactic and a lawsuit and still got it put on the ballot. Power was not handed to them, they took it.
November 3 matters. Vote. Bring everyone you can. After that, show up to a county board meeting, union hall, the library, the corner where the vigil stands… a ballot is a single instrument, and the people shrinking our lives work every other day of the year.
Thirty years in, this paper still believes the Central Valley is where the country turns. Here, change has never arrived as lightning. It looks like a folding table on a hot sidewalk, a neighbor silent last spring now standing at the microphone. Nothing supernatural—only ordinary people becoming. Prove us right.
Solidarity as always.
