I’m actually pleased with how it turned out even though I always get emotional talking about my dad when I start these things.
My friend and colleague Amaya’s slideshow from LGBTQ Minus Tobacco was extremely helpful for this presentation. The previous speaker had talked about second and third-hand smoke, so it was a great segue to go into all kinds of passive smoke, including fourth-hand.
This organization I spoke at is about clean air both indoors and outdoors, so it was a really good fit and the timing was right with a room full of activists, which coincidentally had my activist friend Adjoa in attedance. With her I did store surveys in January.
The genesis for the invitation was when I realized my kayak club buddy was a long-time Vallejo activist. Ken Szutu is highly honored for his environmental work and very graciously extended the invitation.
We had a great Autumn Meeting with our Glen Cove Community Association with representatives from Vallejo Police and Fire departments, Solano County Resource Development and the Food Cooperative that Shando and I recently joined as owners.
Shando and I volunteered all day at the Bearrison Street Fair in San Francisco for LGBTQ Minus Tobacco. It was wonderful to see so many of our friends and let them know about my activism of this kind throughout the Bay Area, particularly in Vallejo. Plenty of Vallejoans were present as well!
During our routine visit to Vallejo’s Art Walk this month, I was pleased to see the anime depictions of at least four of the local environmentalists recognized by the Vision of the Wild event.
Ken Szutu is our friend from kayaking, but was happy to know that he was recognized for his outdoor air monitoring and other endeavors.
Liat Meitzenheimmer is a leader with Fresh Air Vallejo and wrote a wonderful letter in support of the Tobacco Retail License we’re trying to get passed in Vallejo.
Adjoa McDonald is a teacher, was on the Board of the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, a fellow activist against Big Tobacco, and founder of the Vallejo Project.
Doug Darling is the founder of the Vallejo Watershed Alliance. I originally met him while doing shoreline cleanups in Glen Cove, but he also was instrumental in getting the fireworks from Six Flags from shooting their debris over Lake Chabot in Dan Foley Park, where I regularly kayak and pick up trash that floats on the surface. Who knows what kind of damage has been done to the lake at the bottom over the decades.
Next to the Mare Island Tap Room (very dog friendly), which is in Benicia, we were invited by Remax Realtors to host an adoption event by the organizers of the Benicia Dog Festival. We brought four adoptable dogs from the Humane Society of the North Bay, two of which were transported by Shando and me.
This morning a Vallejo college student and now adult former youth activist, Genesis Miguel, appeared on OZCAT radio’s Vallejo Project program here in Vallejo.
The subject matter is the activism that we’re doing to get a Tobacco Retail License (TRL) instituted here in Vallejo, which the City Council unanimously directed city staff to draft robustly for voting on in the coming weeks.
Our coalition successfully got Smoke-Free Multi-Unit Housing passed unanimously last year, but this year we want to further that health equity and protect youth even more from becoming the next generation addicted to nicotine after being targeted by Big Tobacco. Vaping is an epidemic among youth, particularly the ones who are of color and queer, as they smoke at higher rates and have been specifically targeted by Big Tobacco in their advertising. Deceptive highlighter-styled devices and other decoy products are meant to avoid detection as well.
Genesis is so right when she says, “Educate yourself on WHO is selling this.”
It’s not some kind of native American tradition to push tobacco in the forms it is now to maximize nicotine addiction. It’s historically callous, huge corporate capitalists who target new populations around the world, all the while knowing the product’s addictive potential. Here in the USA when men weren’t enough, they made it acceptable in society for women to smoke. Believe it or not, it was controversial when the first women smoked on screen (gasp). When the European descendants weren’t enough to grow profit, they went specifically for people of color, showing how “hip” they were. When hetero-normative people weren’t enough, they made sure to play upon the queer populations as a purported ally.
Big Tobacco has to keep changing their names as their true nature is revealed. Altria literally doesn’t mean anything. This is deliberate. The families who made their fortunes on tobacco (Reynolds & Tisch are just two examples) also took their names off of products once there became a stigma and people suffered too much loss, even though they put their names on HOSPITALS and medical school buildings!
The business model is always to maximize profit despite the millions of people the product quite predictably kills very prematurely and usually in the most undignified ways, all the while attempting to avoid pesky rules disallowing them from selling to impressionable, rebellious youth. Indeed, that is the only way they can keep surviving as an industry, knowing the lack of mortal thoughts that this age group has when they embark on this incorrectly assumed “safer” vaping option. The medicinal allowance for cannabis in some jurisdictions is probably making it seem like the same vape devices that can be used for tobacco are also harmless. Learning the corporate origins of these devices and the callousness with which these practically anonymous drug lords (the biggest in the world) are exploiting our youth should be the reason for the passion, provided an individual’s health and that of their family is not enough. Case in point, attempts to make tobacco companies look like altruists with big tax write-offs in recent history, like the Whitney “museum” of art. Make sure to play the one-minute audio file on the Whitney link.
I was reminded recently of how disgusting it is that this “museum” exists when I heard it mentioned casually with the other fantastic museums in New York as must-sees on CNN. Lots of museums have controversies for pillaging various cultures around the world, but this one existing at all is a complete insult. I was even invited to events at “the Whitney” when I was in law school in NYC. I let people know why I would never attend those events, nor ever step foot in that building paid for with blood money. I didn’t care what people thought of me if it helped even one more person realize the truth of its origins.
Today we had a great event at the Glen Cove Waterfront Park organized by some great volunteers of the Glen Cove Community Association. Here are some of the music and scenes, and the introduction I did of the Board members in attendance.
The Humane Society of the North Bay tabled there so we had adoptable dogs show up. We brought two of our dogs, who were already tired from kayaking with us earlier in the day.
It was great spending time with neighbors and meeting so many new neighbors I didn’t know in person. I had emailed some of them over the months, and some of them were our direct neighbors.
Thank you to Amaya Wooding and Austin Bruckner Carrillo for standing up for inclusivity and your activism in general. I have very strong ties since childhood to both Sunol and Castro Valley, so this means a lot to me as a gay man who lived and worked many years of my life in CV, Hayward, and Fremont. We are on the right side of history!
