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| MAIN | HISTORY |
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COMMUNITY | NARRATIVES |
ART/CULTURE | |
Toward Barefoot Journalism (cont'd)
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Even in high school, David questioned the way all of us were conditioned by rituals that were imposed on us. As a Sunday school teacher at Centenary Methodist, he discussed with his eighth grade students the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance. He was asked to leave by the church hierarchy,
When Dean first started coming down to the office, he was abrasive and autocratic, "Batman " protested, "Hey, you can't boss me around; I've been here longer than you have! " When Dean was little, he was very shy, and he never did much with groups. He once sent away to the Archie Fan Club to be a cub reporter, but they never wrote back. When he was in high school, he got into rock 'n roll and read a lot of books about total and all encompassing "ways of being," but his real passion in life was art. When Dean discovered Gidra he found a way of combining his love of art, search for a "way of being," and a chance to create changes in a society that had alienated him earlier.
Many personal changes were to take place during 1973 for many on the staff. The process and content of the paper were greatly influenced by those changes in our lives. Most of us were already involved with other community organizations and "work areas": Creative Workshop, Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force, Yellow Brotherhood, Joint Counseling Center, Asian Women's Center, Amerasia Bookstore, Asian Law Collective, just to name a few. Changes in personal relationships and living situations also had an impact. Many of us were forced to readjust priorities as we took on full-time "straight gigs." The three students: Bruce and I were studying law. Linda Fujikawa was becoming increasingly involved at UCLA's school of social welfare, and in the area of casework.
Linda, who was a cheerleader for the Gardena High Mohicans, is a pragmatic and dedicated person. Linda wanted to be effective in what she did, and not just adopt the superficial embellishments of a radical. She once commented:
In the movement's revolutionary fervor to forge a new lifestyle free of materialistic hang-ups we often try very hard to discard any traces of our recent petty bourgeois existence. A good case in point is in the clothing we wear. In fact, we often find ourselves in contradiction when we buy jeans and work shirts rather than wear our now-dated but perfectly wearable pin-striped ivy league shirt or that hot pink princess line dress. Nevertheless, the movement among Asian American people is relatively recent and for that reason, although realizing clothes are not and should not be important, they still often are.
Another symptom of that "revolutionary fervor" was our unwillingness/inability to deal with the realities of our economic condition: the problem of money has been a constant source of concern and apprehension for the staff. When we were students, it was easier because we did not have to worry about many of the financial responsibilities that troubled others, but concerns about "paying our bills" and economically surviving soon became real enough.
In our five-year history, no one received a single payroll check from Gidra. We tried to think of ways in which "survival needs" and our work at Gidra could be integrated, but because we had to work at other places in the meantime, we weren't able to become financially self-sufficient, at least not enough to have salaries for the staff. A vicious cycle.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the many generous contributors who believed in us-our subscribers and advertisers, our friends and our parents-and the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA who, from time to time, subsidized us, and GCYP, who gave us a grant. But in the final analysis, we weren't able to meet the financial burden of rising costs, both in our own bills and Gidra's. Yet we know even now, that there is a way to build and sustain a self-sufficient progressive media, and that someday we will do it, as changes keep happening within us and around us.