Faster, better…

Archive for October 31st, 2009

Teresa Kimari, Petaluma, California In Memory of my Friend

In 1977 I was the best man at the wedding of Kenneth  and Teresa. I had grown up with Kenny Kimari. We were inseparable friends since I moved to California from Ohio back in 1963. When Kenny met Teresa so did I. Even though Kenny lived far off in Northern California near Eureka at the time I vacationed up there just to be with a friend that I considered my brother. When Kenny met Teresa I knew in my heart she was his special jewel. The find of a lifetime. Men have scoured the world over for the perfect wife and Kenny found Teresa dispatching police officers for a small Humboldt County town. They were peas in a  pod.

We were all in police work by 1977. Kenny was a police officer, I was a dispatcher at a bay area police agency. We spoke the same language and understood shift work, stress, maddening work hours, and all the sacrifices.

It was pretty easy for me to see why Kenny loved Teresa so much.  We all three became close friends. She accepted me into her new world with Kenny because she knew how much Kenny meant to me as a friend. Teresa has been my best friend for some thirty-two years sharing Kenny and their life together. Last week MS finally took her away from Kenny and their three children and from friends like me. People that met her and loved her for her smarts, her common sense, her sense of family, her wonderful kids, and the marriage she and Kenny worked so hard on for all of those years.

Last year I got a chance to say goodbye to Teresa when I visited California after having been gone for seven years. I cried while I held her hands as she lay there in the hospital and she would have none of it. That’s how she was.  She switched the conversation to catching up on everything we had missed just like real best friends do. Even so I was a devastated that I was going to lose my friend that couldn’t beat the disease she fought so hard to conquer. She on the other hand was very happy to see me kept chatting away.

My best friend Teresa Kimari is gone, but I have pictures that Kenny gave me. One was of her dispatching police calls at one of her former agencies and the other was the wedding party where I was Kenny’s best man. Kenny was the best man at my wedding but then you probably guessed that.

Teresa was an advocate of the MS Society and despite her handicap, and as the disease slowly took her mobility, she fought hard to fund the fight for a cure.  This is her memorial page at the Society. Visit the page if you knew my best pal Teresa and remember her with a donation in her name. Keep Kenny and his kids your prayers.

Teresa made that last police broadcast. She’s 10-7, and off duty, but her voice will ring in the hearts and minds of those officers she watched over and protected and especially in the hearts of those like me that really got to know her as the wife of my life-long friend. I am so thankful that I still have Kenny and his kids. Teresa left a legacy only the most wonderful mom and friend could leave. I see Teresa in each of the kids. I will always treasure the memories of Teresa Kimari and as hard as it is Teresa,  I will do my best to celebrate your life and stop tearing up every time I think of losing you.

I get the occasional request from college students, Internet magazines, and once in a great while the new media to speak about graffiti vandalism. Most I refer to the Director of the NoGraf Corp., Randy Campbell who is in a much better place statistically to discuss current issues.

The other day I received an email request from a Yahoo email account. The student was in a two-day rush to complete a story on what sound like a pro-graffiti event recently held in the San Francisco Bay Area. The student used the Fox News line, to keep the story “fair and balanced.”

Most of the requests I get are intended as harassment. News outlets use real email accounts that identify who they are, provide telephone numbers, give themselves time to write a story, and schedule an interview. I tried to be polite:

I am a 1983 BCA gradudate of SFSU. Never once have I had an interview from a student of SFSU but at least one or more so-called “professors” have spoken very poorly of me on their public website without ever having actually met me. So I’m not enthusiastic about interviewing. The NoGraf Network and graffiti victims are usually labeled as racists, right wing whackos, idiots, and haters by those that promote vandalism in our communities anyway and my interviews have almost always been used to stir the pot against the anti-graffiti movement. (e.g. taken out of content)

I guess all I can say is that San Francisco is a victim community with a very serious graffiti problem. I suggest that you visit your Department of Public Works, the police, a graffiti victim or two. Much of what I believe is located at the Anti-Graffiti FAQ at http://www.dougweb.com/faq.html. My efforts are now focused on helping the NoGraf Corp at http://www.nograffiti.com in any way I can as a Director of that non-profit.

Because of the various threats I have received over the years I also have to ignore emails from the free and anonymous email services like yahoo or gmail. If you had had time to send a request on school letterhead I may have considered a response. Since I have absolutely no way of determining who you really are I must respectfully decline. It appears you may have left the other side of the story to the last minute anyway so how could you do it justice?

Regards,
Doug Smith

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Had this person done his homework he would have found many in the San Francisco community to be against vandalism of all kinds. The police, homes associations, churches and so on. I had the great privilege once to be invited as a guest to a news conference where then Mayor Willie Brown spoke eloquently against graffiti vandalism. He and I were on opposite sides of some political issues but I always found him to be rooted in common sense when it came to the image of his city adn the safety of neighborhoods. The San Francisco Department of Public Works has always been and remains to this day one of the most forward thinking city departments when it comes to graffiti abatement and the quality of the neighborhoods. The trouble has been that the number and persistence of the vandals in that part of California has always been a challenge for any anti-graffiti movement. The vandalism is encouraged by bizarre opinions of far-left students and some educators and groups that have been taken in by the promises of vandals to use only regulated walls.

Other great anti-graffiti cities exist in the SF Bay area. San Jose comes to mind. MY associations in the past with city employees and volunteers in San Jose from the abatement crews to gang interventionists have always been positive. San Jose city government always did its best to battle vandalism.

I had been away away from California for seven years when I went back for a visit in 2008. What I did see there was that vandals are more prolific and abatement on State property…Well I have to be careful here. I saw a lot of vandalism on State freeways, signs, and over passes. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of the abatement programs.It was extremely sad to see.

What I do know is that the City of Santa Rosa, California took the lead in 2008 and sponsored an Anti-Graffiti Conference with the NoGraf Corp (of which I am a Director.) Now I am particularly proud of that department because of their long-time anti-graffiti efforts and because my best friend was an officer there for many years. SPD is a superb police department. SPD rocks!

No, it wouldn’t have taken much for this probably pro-graffiti student to discover there is much more to interviewing one person to be fair and balanced when writing about an event that may have glorified vandalism. So to all of you young aspiring journalism students, take it from a former BCA grad. Do your homework, use more than the Internet to get your story and start writing weeks before your deadline.

Hats off to graffiti fighters everywhere especially the abatement volunteers. America’s unsung community heroes. Through your persistence cities and towns learn to remain vigilant.

You have to wonder about American business. They love the blogger and hate the blogger. They can love your opinions and hate your opinions. They can be friendly and unfriendly, passive and aggressive. But regardless of whether American business is right or wrong they intend to win against the blogger.

There are search companies that scan websites, even personal websites like mine, looking for “shudder” stolen content. Their bots are anonymous, that is uninvited, disobey the robots.txt protocols, and take what they want – if they can get through. Since most of these commercial secret police do not behave as a bot should behave certain data strings or the lack of same give them away and the bot are blocked. I never realized after having used a WordPress protection plugin what some of these blocked were attempting to do. What else were they wanting to use MY content for I wonder?

Then there is the new crop of real secret and private police silently making their own lists. American business is now scanning the blogosphere for blogs that their clients want tracked for political, commercial, or law enforcement purposes. Tame personal blogs like mine. When you don’t consider yourself a threat to democracy and the American way but still find an American business gathering your pages for thorough analysis and you don’t know who their customer is, it is more than a little creepy. It is stifling. (I don’t see the press even writing about it. The press is paying those other companies to scan our blogs to make sure our content isn’t actually their content.)

Then there are the those whom I believe are claiming to do one thing but perhaps actually doing another. Groups, and perhaps companies, looking for ways to hack into your private sites so that spam can be placed against your wishes.

After having worked in the software industry I am really worried about the great institution we call American business. What I saw in the business gives credence to the creation of these new Internet denizens claiming to be part of the business community. What I learned in the 90′s was that American business now uses trickery, propaganda, and lawyers to put competitors out of business. What we no longer use as the effective measure of success is product quality, value, and customer service so the market can decide.

American business now goes for the jugular and that extends to their interactions with customers. Customer service is severely lacking. Problems are not solved they are avoided or made so difficult to solve that the customer gives up. Fees are egregious but touted as necessary for a company to survive. The companies can somehow still afford to pay huge salaries even while making layoffs and reducing quality and service.

The threats to the common blogger and consumer on the Internet are no different than anywhere else in this environment. American business or capitalism as we thought we knew it doesn’t exist. (Not entirely true there are still honest companies but they are in peril.) Greedy bean counters are not interested in charging what the market will bear and provide service, quality, and value all the while while maintaining their honesty and integrity. No the new new marketing, sales, and bean counting elite have decided capitalism means they must take huge salaries and charge what the market will bear and then whatever else they can get away with. They remain in command of their market share only if they put competition and critics out of business by whatever means available to the company – all honesty, integrity, value, and service aside. The success of a company is no longer determined by service, quality, value, honesty, and integrity. The better product, the better concept, the better service may die. Success is determined by greed.

Bloggers need to start watching their logs more closely. Most have very little to fear unless we actually lose the First Amendment someday, but some American business may do what they can to paint you into a corner. I worry that blogging by individuals may be the new target of certain business and political elite.