Day: July 30, 2010

Today’s installment of News Chum takes a look back, nostalgically, at things that were:

• The Transbay Terminal. Now, I’m not a Bay Area person; I’m native SoCal. But this article on the history and the closing of the Transbay Terminal fascinated me. Reading about the blocked off diner, the waiting areas, the dark and dingy facilities made me think of two historical places in Los Angeles: Los Angeles Union Station, which has had a ghost restaurant for years (although I think it is used occasionally), and which still echoes with the ghosts of the major passenger trains it once had, and the Pacific Electric Subway Terminal, which is no longer in use and hides its ghosts.
• The Blue Cube. Going a little further south, we have the CSTC, better known as the Blue Cube. The Blue Cube—in fact, all of Onizuka AFS—is shutting down, and the Mercury News has a nice article on it. For the last 25 years I have been involved with companies involved with the Blue Cube and the satellite business. My current employer is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary, and we have been involved with the cube since it is earliest days. I do remember driving by it regularly when I was up there; its interesting to see it go.
• Politics For The People. Another thing that we’ve lost—and perhaps the most tragic—is politics for the people, as opposed to politics for the special interests or politics for the party. A number of things bring this to mind—perhaps the most galling are the comments you can read on almost any political news post that seem to blame ever single problem in the world today on President Obama. Even the LA Times has an article on how Obama is the Velcro president: problems just seem to stick to him, and his significant legislative accomplishments seem to be lost. We forget the successes; we don’t see how things might have been worse. We seem to have lost the ability to think critically. How many people today remember that it wasn’t the Democrats that have passed the most sweeping legislation to impact industry and raise costs for both industry and government—it was the Republicans (the legislation that created the EPA and the need for Environmental Protection Reports was passed by the Nixon administration)? Even when the Government tries to solve problems (as with the legislation to address the loopholes that led to the Gulf Oil spill), it gets bogged down by party line voting. As long as we define ourselves by what we are against, instead of having a positive statement of what we are for, the ability of our politicians to actually solve problems is just a thing of the past.