March 22, 2010
Stewart Udall, RIP
Panhandling in Yosemite
By DAVE LINDORFF
Suddenly an old ranger drove up. He told me I had to stop (panhandling at Yosemite), and looking a little embarrassed, said he had to arrest me for panhandling. I had never heard the term panhandling, and objected that we had not been passing around a pan or anything, but the ranger explained that the term meant begging. Again I protested. I had been playing music, and far from bothering anyone, people had been coming over to me to listen. But the ranger wouldn't accept my argument. He took us to the main ranger station, where I noted that there were a couple of jail cells, and began filling out our tickets.
When he finished with our tickets, the ranger handed them to us. I looked down and saw the fine: $500.00 each! "Don't try to skip out on those fines," the ranger said as we left. "It's a federal offense, and the FBI will come after you if you don't pay."
When I finally made it back to Connecticut, I decided to protest my fine. Not expecting much, I typed up a letter to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. In it, I described how my friend and I had been earning our way across the country by performing folk music on the street, and explained that in the Yosemite parking lot, I had been entertaining people, not harassing them for money. I did not, I wrote, think it was fair for the government to be fining someone $500 who was just trying to make a few bucks to get by. (I also objected to the shooting of a fleeing drug suspect by a ranger.) I was stunned when, a few weeks later, I got my letter back, with a hand-written note on it, written in red ink. "I agree. Forget the fine," the note said. It was signed: Stewart Udall.
I'm just trying to imaging Ken Salazar, the current secretary of the Interior Department, a friend of big oil, a defender of Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and an ally of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, writing a letter like that.
In the decades since 1968, the Interior Department has become more and more an advocate of huge corporate extractive industries. Even the Parks Service has become increasingly a business operation. More significantly, the whole US government has become less and less connected with the ordinary citizen. The idea of a member of the president's cabinet personally writing back to a citizen--much less a citizen who had been arrested and fined for a legal transgression--is at this point almost inconceivable.
And yet there was Secretary Udall, in 1968, at the height of the student anti-war movement, writing a note to a hippie folksinger, vacating a fine he had received from the Park Service for violating a park ordinance.
Stewart Udall did a lot of great things during his career. He oversaw the establishment of four major national parks--Canyonlands, Redwood, North Cascades and Guadalupe Mountains--six national monuments, nine national recreation areas and eight national seashores--often over significant local opposition from real estate and corporate interests. Earlier, as a private attorney, he successfully represented thousands of uranium miners, nuclear industry workers, and ordinary citizens of Utah and Nevada who had been exposed to radiation by the US nuclear program (he won in federal court but the decision was overturned on appeal).
But to me, Stewart Udall represented something else: a public servant who never felt he was so important that he didn't have to pay attention to the ordinary citizen--even one who had broken the law. In these days when government has become obsessed with "law and order," when police have become para-military enforcers, and when elected officials and government executives and bureaucrats have come to see themselves as elevated in importance way beyond the teeming masses they rule, it's important to remember that it wasn't always like that.
Nor does it have to be.
Read the full article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03222010.html
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