Last night’s meeting of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) was a procedural train wreck—a proverbial circus that would be amusing if it didn’t undermine trust in how San Francisco’s Democratic Party operates.
Rules of order were nowhere to be found.
I was there to support a resolution I helped develop: The Resolution Calling for Accountability and Budget Responsibility in Corporate Tax Disputes. It’s a straightforward proposal. In a city facing an $817.5 million budget shortfall, the least we can do is call out corporations like Airbnb and Uber for suing the City to avoid paying taxes that fund basic services like mental health care, homelessness programs, and public hospitals. Simple enough.
I don’t upgrade phones for better cameras, brighter screens, or to get access to the newest cell networks. I like using my phones until they physically stop working. And my Pixel 4a, bought in December 2020, was functioning fine until Google broke it.
The first week of this year, I got an email about the Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program. Buried in the corporate speak was the real message: Google was going to push a software update to “improve stability,” which in practice meant degrading battery performance. It wasn’t optional. And the “appeasement” they offered: a token fifty bucks, or a hundred dollars in credit at their store. Maybe a battery replacement, if you were lucky enough to find a shop that could do it.
In Una lucha más / Another Struggle, I wrote about the weight of carrying history: how every day is part of a struggle that started long before us. This reflection picks up from there but now focuses on how we live while we fight.
Over a century ago, two of Zapata’s manifestos were translated into Nahuatl, a Native Mexican language, and circulated among Indigenous villagers in Tlaxcala. The texts are powerful and worth reading because of how they interpret the cultural, ethical, and political message for people with a very different lived reality. The translator didn’t use the word “revolution.” Instead, he envisioned it as netehuiliztle — the will to struggle — and revolutionaries as netehuiloani, those who come striking with stones. It was a declaration not of ideology, but of moral clarity and collective will.
