April Third Movement

April 7, 2009

Some will recall that Carrie Iverson and I were married by Paul Rupert out front of AEL at the occupation. We had a daughter—who (now 38) has a daughter of her own. Then we flew off to an internship in Detroit. Alas our marriage was ill-fated but as the former Sheila Harper (actually Sheila Thorne) wrote in her bio, she and I got together after I returned to the peninsula in 1971-2 and have stayed that way. We too have a daughter, now 34, and so between Sheila and I we have 4 kids and 6 grandkids, most in Northern California, including a grandson attending UC Santa Cruz.

We lived in East San Jose (in sal si puede!) from 1973-86. Then we moved to Berkeley so our daughter, then showing musical talent and interest, could be part of a public high school with a well-known music program and so I could get my masters in public health (MPH) at UCB in epidemiology. But before that, from 1975-78, I worked full time, as a physician, for the United Farmworkers' Union. A critical essay I contributed about that fascinating experience is posted on the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project Web site with hundreds of others from former staff.

After the UFW, in San Jose, I worked at community clinics and was Medical Director of a couple of them. I co-chaired the successful San Jose "Jobs with Peace" ballot initiative that called for cutting the military budget (1982?) and did some foot work in the first Jesse Jackson campaign. Later, after my MPH at Berkeley in '87, I did short stints as acting Health Officer for the City's Health Department and later San Mateo County. As a private citizen I formed the committee that created the Berkeley High School Health Center.

Then, from 1992-2001, I was Medical Director of the Center for Elders' Independence (CEI), one of the sites of the Program of All Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), a model initiated by On Lok Senior Services in San Francisco. People interested in senior care can Google PACE Model or National Pace Association. The model is an adult day health center, team-based care program for disabled and frail elders living in the community. The model keeps participants out of hospitals and nursing homes successfully through the end of life with intensive observation, intervention, and quality of life considerations. It was intensive for me also—doing everything imaginable from playing guitar to night call and hospital care, supervising physicians and mid levels, management, developing the quality improvement program, working with families and so on. I went to Cuba in 2000 to describe the model at an international conference on the rights of the disabled. At age 60 I started to worry I might soon become a program participant and resigned.

Since '02, I've been working part time with Alameda County outpatient clinics. During this latter period of semi-retirement, I directed an effort (Retro Poll) to expose how political polling is used to manipulate public opinion. We did some polling ourselves and our Web site is still in place for anyone interested at www.retropoll.org.

I co-led a UC Berkeley Teach-in on Torture (2005), which that other friendly University up here kept off campus, refusing also to send out our press release despite sponsorship by 3 departments and over 100 faculty. Marjorie Cohn and Terry Karl of A3M were both panel participants providing their expertise.

In reaction to Bush et al, I wrote (2003-4) a satiric novel, The Last Tale of Mendel Abbe: Sonny Bush and the Wise Men of New Chelm, available through Amazon.com, and apart from that, some plays (two full length, one a one-act, none published). Last summer I traveled to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories with the Middle East Children's' Alliance; and I have been touring a slide show based upon that visit, The Political Geography of the Jewish State: Zionism's Facts on the Ground, which I have shown to college classes, central valley Latinos etc.

I am currently working on a new effort, called Not Another DIME! The Campaign Against US Terror Weapons which is based on a particularly criminal US weapon (technical design, incidentally, by the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Labs) that we gave Israel and was used on the civilian population of Gaza recently—the DIME bomb (www.notanotherdime.net). This Web site will open this Friday.

I write op/ed pieces published in East Bay papers—the Berkeley Daily Planet more often than others (www.berkeleydailyplanet.com). Sheila and I travel, backpack and cross country ski in the Sierras and love to spend time with the grandkids. The most rewarding aspect of this list for me has been the several people who renewed old friendships off-line having seen our names. Of course this list fosters the somewhat erroneous conception of A3M as "THE" mid-peninsula anti-war and anti-imperialist movement. It was but one part of a 10-year period of events and goings-on. Even at Stanford, though, I think it accurate to remember the occupation as the broad, high point of student peace activism at Stanford. Yet, many of the people who were active with us in the Peninsula of the 60s are not on this list-this time. I don't mean just the dead whom I asked that we remember in a much earlier e-mail. And so there is the usual danger that self-containment and self-definition present in politics—the danger of overgeneralization and narrowness to which Phil Trounstine appropriately alluded in his ironic quote about frogs and wells, and that we humans are all susceptible to. Speaking of which (frogs), a friend, Thatcher Hurd, a well known children's writer who publishes with Harper-Collins, has a new book out called Bad Frogs. For those with grandkids, keep an eye out for it, as it is mischievous (in the tradition of his Cat's Pajamas and Mamma Don't Allow).

Marc Sapir