Culture Change e-Letter #13

For peace and justice on all levels
Sustainability Starts With Family Solidarity

by Jan Lundberg

In times of strife and unprecedented crisis, it is vital to remember our structural basis. Aversion to war when there has been false peace for so long may lack understanding of conflict and motives of aggressors. We in the U.S. live in the most materialistic, alienating society in history. In every other country the level of violence is less, normally, and the strength of the family greater even as bloody upheaval reigns. I share below a personal story that is ongoing, that in 2001 contributed to our organization's changing the name of our magazine Auto-Free Times to Culture Change. 

 

At this unsettling time of expanded war and terrorism, we must address not only our dangerous oil reliance but the dominant culture's core weakness at the community level. To create a sustainable culture, we will all see and contribute to massive change rather soon. A good many citizens are already into positive changes for a more fulfilling life, one that has a future. It isn't easy as we struggle for peace.

When I was evicted from my family’s home February 6th, in Arcata in the shadow of the redwood forest of coastal California, it was a beautiful day. It also helped that at least one family member and several friends were there to help me rescue my belongings.

To be there was a sacrifice for my daughter because, once again, oppression was being meted out by an armed agency that had represented, against her interests, the aggression of wealthy, influential forces.

The affable Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy evicting me was named Lund, and wore the uniform of the torturers who had pepper-sprayed teenage girls in the eyes with Q-Tips during nonviolent protests for the ancient forest. Officer Lund no doubt knew who Vernell "Spring" Lundberg was, as his boss and former boss have been found potentially liable for unconstitutional excessive force, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Spring has a measure of solidarity from family for her civil rights lawsuit, and for her activism that is musical as well when not court related or news-media oriented. Grandma Mesa Vernell Lundberg, a former lawyer, is proud of her namesake Vernell Spring. Legal, musical and activist triumphs enhance the family name—to some of us. At the extreme end on non-solidarity is her famous aunt, Trilby Lundberg, a servant of major oil companies, who yanked a home out from under family members by supporting the liquidation of the property. 

Mesa Vernell Dobson Lundberg, right, in protective (profitable) custody against her will, June 27, 2003

The house, on a quiet street near Humboldt State University, is owned by Mesa Vernell, 82 years old, who has wanted to return there to live with family. But, thanks to her daughter Trilby’s "testimoney," Mesa is held captive in a hospice-nursing home, although she is not terminally ill and is not too disabled. Mesa’s dream to live again in freedom, and start saving money after a long forced stay in "$anta" Barbara, California, have been perhaps dashed.

Even if Trilby were not in the picture henceforth, what has been put in motion is a money-sucking scam by professionals who really know how to "take care of" an elderly person no matter what the elder or family members think or want. The team of opportunists that prey upon any "conservatee" or patient are only in place—as they themselves and the judge would admit—due to lack of family solidarity.

The Sustainable Energy Institute, Culture Change’s nonprofit tax-deductible charity umbrella, was based in Mesa’s house at her pleasure.  Now, being evicted, we are moving into a downtown Arcata office with some disorganization. (click here to support our new office) That inconvenience and the extra costs and hassles are the least of it. We are more interested in the eviction’s illustration on sustainable living: It is only through solidarity that sustainable living has a chance. Homo Sapiens evolved in cooperative family/tribal behavior, to survive. "Sustainable solidarity" begins at home, in the heart, and flows outward. Some traditions still around today can help, but "using nature as if we don’t own it" is a concept and world view that needs reviving and application universally, now!

A Home Remained After $30 Million Loss
Mesa’s modest redwood house is spacious, sound and graced by organic gardens. The lawn became a potato and parsnip patch, because I believe in depaving: Is not a lawn just biological pavement and a waste of food producing land? The driveway’s depaving had begun years ago, but was stopped by Grandma Mesa when the sledge-hammering blows shook the foundation of the house. There is a cottage in back, which housed a Registered Nurse who is a Legal Nurse Consultant; she was evicted too. This RN, however, is a valuable ally of Mesa's.

A judge in Eureka decided on February 5th that we had not answered the eviction suit with a defense, despite voluminous pleadings we had submitted. A hearing may still occur to resolve the matter of a default judgment against us. The judge presided over my jury trial in 1996 when I was charged for riding my bicycle in a protest—taking over Highway 101, the Redwood Highway, in a Critical Mass bike ride of over a hundred protesters; our action highlighted the police brutality perpetrated on nonviolent protesters who were slowing down the clear cutting of the last of the tallest trees in the world.

Humboldt elected a new District Attorney in 2002 in large part because of the backlash against the prior DA who had approved of the aforementioned pepper-spray torture. The new DA, Paul Gallegos, has pledged to deal with violent crimes against protesters, and, of importance to my family, address elder abuse and white collar crime.  An example of the latter is his new lawsuit against Pacific Lumber for falsifying data on logging's effects on unstable slopes.

My mother was kidnapped from her home in Arcata in 2000, and taken to Santa Barbara where her health was thereby seriously jeopardized. Though recovered, she languishes in the hospice, and she since lost almost half a million dollars, most of her estate. But law enforcement does not always appreciate as criminal certain activity, when a family is involved. The violating of criminal statutes against this elderly patient along with the kidnapping have not seen as anything but civil-law family squabbling (or sibling rivalry), by certain officers, officials and members of news media locally and nationally.

That kind of denial is much like the Humboldt County government’s and the Times-Standard (Eureka) newspaper’s insistence that the pepper-spray lawsuit is about determining the legality of excessive force—when the federal courts have settled that issue.

Similarly, the fleecing of my mother’s estate and robbing her of liberty and happiness is dismissed by many, even family members, as a feud between a brother and sister who once vied for control of Lundberg Survey Incorporated. One can expect sensationalizing by news media when it is time-consuming to confirm a record of abuse and financial fraud. But even more crucial is that when a family does not come together and enforce ethical conduct and love between its members, the unraveling of society has begun.

Neighbors were generally not "there" for us the morning of eviction, although ninety-five-year-old Mrs. W. was there with us in spirit, nearby, taking it easy as she should. Another neighbor saw the situation, but just ignored what was happening to me, my family and the nurse. When we don’t support each other when one person or one family is wronged, we trade long-term survival as a community (and perhaps even as a species) for the momentary peace-and-quiet of noninvolvement. If you let down your family, do you still have one? Is a neighbor just someone to say hello to and no more? We ultimately support domestic terror or fascism, or random theft, amongst ourselves as The Holy Dollar increasingly determines today’s choices and allegiances.

Mesa's case has had the benefit of a non-family member who has served heroically and selflessly in a key, professional capacity: Barbara Shults.  She is a Registered Nurse and, most fortunately for Mesa, a Legal Nurse Consultant.  With Barbara on the premises, and having visited Mesa and appeared in court, the professional opportunists profiting off Mesa's captivity are more clearly on thinner ice than they usually might be in elder-care cases that they routinely enjoy.

Mesa Vernell is healthy, sane and fun, despite being increasingly depressed over her plight in an institutional care situation depriving her of dignity and a more therapeutic environment at home. The Humboldt County Court Investigator concluded last summer that Mesa needs to return to her home to live. Yet, Santa Barbara Judge J. William McLafferty ordered that Mesa remain in a super costly minimum-therapeutic hospice and have her home sold to pay for the facility’s over $6,000-a-month cost. Mesa’s clear wishes to the contrary, as a conservatee, were ignored utterly—despite a doctor’s court-ordered analysis that she be involved in all court proceedings affecting her. Bogus excuses of her house containing excessive "mold and cold" were the highest ranking factors cited by Mesa’s captors that the judge went on. The Court Investigator, knowing the kinds of professional and legal fees made off Mesa, and knowing Trilby Lundberg’s oil industry clout, later observed, "Money talks."

Could Mesa’s judge really have been impressed by the pathetic accusation that the nurse was my girlfriend? Or that Trilby’s friend, Conservator Mary Lou Parks, of Lompoc, and Park’s Santa Barbara attorney David Turpin, should be believed when my investigator-approved care-giving plan for my mother is treated instead as simply my self-interest at play?

Joining the mold-and-cold and Jan's-an-opportunist chorus was my hapless brother, who got caught trying to sell Mesa's possessions and is prevented by the Arcata Police from staying in her home. His mentor is Tim Such, who packed off the old woman and her son so he could have the place to himself. My brother and I used to have more in common than pushing for a legal reversal of a stock sale whereby our mother lost to her daughter around $30 million worth of ownership in the family business that I used to run.

Does Mesa have a lawyer? Sure, but the firm refused to appeal Mesa's reversals because the judge had ordered a 20% reduction in legal fees. Now her $anta Barbara lawyer, Joe Bush, is trying to "help" her by advocating for her placement in another similar facility in $anta Barbara that his friend has built. She asked Bush to help fight the eviction, but he refused. But don't blame him, when it was Mesa's family, close and extended, that let her down. My point is not to blame or air dirty laundry. Rather, I wish to stress that individualistic materialism and "self-preservation" has run amok, especially in the U.S. All other countries have stronger family ties, less violence and less consumption of the Earth. The trend of each person's becoming a mere economic unit (of a society geared toward endless quantitative growth) can only end in disaster for us all.

The very biosphere is threatened, mainly by energy use for questionable climate-changing ways of living. Excessive driving, for example, by too many consumers, promotes war for oil. A U.S. family is no longer one- or two-car, but three- and four-car. This fits the solo economic unitization of family members, who most likely have their own TVs in their rooms. North Americans don’t share very well. Each household, which in the U.S. is mostly one person nowadays, has its own stove, refrigerator, computer, etc. This kind of wealth yields a kind of poverty that destroys from within (as well as destroying nature).

There is another way, but not for too many billions, especially when they are "units." When we must begin sharing, perhaps only due to the arrival of the imminent global petroleum supply crisis (as reserves fail to accommodate more growth), we will begin the return to sustainable, solidarity-based living. Energy waste has contributed to family dissolution, and our selfishness has not escaped the notice of the world.

The members of the U.S. family share less and less their dreams or struggles. Pre$$ures prevent us from seeing how solidarity enables triumph over adversity. Threats are posed by scheming rogue individuals who are both within our families and without as they prey from outside. The rogues have taken over completely, in families, towns, our nation, and—maybe after an Iraq War—the world. Dissolution of human relations and of peace starts in our families, although the fragmentation of the family is mainly due to outside pressures from "$ociety." Get together now.  Don't be a unit.

***

For more information read: Family cohesion challenged by sprawl and greed.

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