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Continued Mediations on Growing Up in the Bay Area
They put a pay-only carpool lane on the highway in the East Bay (880). Well… to be more precise, they’re adding a FasTrak lane to pretty much every major highway in the Bay from here on out.
The cost to ride the BART now is almost $5.00 just to get on and increases when you travel across multiple stop zones. BART also has stopped service after 9 PM, as if that helps to make things any easier when each train is 15–20 minutes apart. I don’t even want to check how much more it costs to ride CalTrain.
San Francisco feels empty but empty for all the wrong reasons. There are more houseless folks because of the pandemic, and the city has continued to refuse to put people into the thousands of vacant apartments that are in the city, priced too high for almost anyone to move in.
I think a lot about the implications of the place I grew up in, in large part with consideration to the level of violence that was developed and cultivated here. And I don’t just mean the physical displacement and removal of Black and brown folks from East Palo Alto, East Menlo Park, or any number of places across the Bay; I mean the actual internet tools utilized by the state to wield and create chaos to destabilize colonized peoples and our movements. I’m thinking about Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, all of which are services we are…
