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Life & Times Transcript
11/28/06 Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is made possible by a grant from the Boeing Company. Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Signs of wealth are everywhere in Santa Barbara, but in one area, there's a critical shortage. Pat Wheatley>> I'm seeing families scrambling. I hear the same story over and over again. There just is not enough access for childcare. They cannot find quality childcare. Val Zavala>> And then, his images of nature are stunning, but Ansel Adams' most haunting work focused on the prisoners of Manzanar. These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> It's one of the biggest frustrations for parents with toddlers, where to find quality daycare, and it's not just a problem for low-income families or single parents. In fact, in some affluent cities, the problem is even worse. Why is that? Paul Vercammen got some answers when he headed north to Santa Barbara. Paul Vercammen>> For Cindy Benelli, a doctorate degree in economics at UC Santa Barbara -- Cindy Benelli>> There's fear there. Paul Vercammen>> -- is just beyond her reach. Cindy Benelli>> I'm scheduled to be a teaching assistant this coming January and I need to be at the university at eight o'clock three days a week. That's my teaching aspect of it in addition to my research and I have no idea what I'm going to do with her. Paul Vercammen>> What to do with three-month old baby, Kendall. Cindy's daughter and second child lies in her crib, a cute symbol of a distressing situation. Santa Barbara County is suffering from a severe shortage of early childhood teachers and caregivers. Cindy's husband works full-time and Cindy already has her two-year old daughter, Reese, at UCSB's Orfalea Family Children's Center, but there's no room for baby Kendall, for now at least. Cindy Benelli>> It is very stressful and it's not just stress upon myself, but it's stress upon the family too. So my husband also experiences it, so it's not just the woman's issue. It's an entire society issue. Paul Vercammen>> But why such a severe shortage? Pat Wheatley>> "So that we have something to monitor." Paul Vercammen>> Pat Wheatley is an influential advocate for young children throughout California. She's the Director of First 5 Santa Barbara County, a program funded by a fifty cent tax on cigarettes passed by voters eight years ago. First 5 Santa Barbara County will distribute an estimated three million dollars in tax revenues this fiscal year for health and education programs for children five years and under. But does it all end up in preschools and daycare centers directly? Pat Wheatley>> But we're also working around dental health. We're working around earlier mental health and other special needs. We're working with the elementary schools that are most challenged by the diversity of children that are coming in and having extreme needs and wanting to work with them. Paul Vercammen>> So now Wheatley hears stories of how administrators are forced to step into preschool classrooms because there are no instructors and she hears parents' frustrations, whether they are looking for state-subsidized childcare or private preschool. Pat Wheatley>> I'm seeing families scrambling. As I meet families up and down our county from Cuyama to Carpinteria, I hear the same story over and over again. There just is not enough access for childcare. They cannot find quality childcare. Paul Vercammen>> The shortage is not only in Santa Barbara. Wheatley says that it's felt throughout California and the nation. But here in Santa Barbara, the problem is magnified for this reason. The median price of a home here in Santa Barbara now stands at $1.1 million dollars. Home prices are among the highest in the state, but salaries are not. The average preschool teacher or caregiver earns eleven dollars an hour in Santa Barbara County. Here at UCSB, it's a little bit higher, but still not enough to meet the housing costs. Let's just say a childcare center does land a prized recruit. That employee winds up having a nightmare commute that would send any two year old off into one big tantrum. Nancy Erisman with almost thirty years experience as a caregiver commutes to her job in Santa Barbara from Santa Clarita. Nancy Erisman>> I give myself two and a half hours each way to take into account the traffic. Paul Vercammen>> Erisman says rents in Santa Barbara and even Ventura are so high that she decided to keep a more affordable place in Santa Clarita and commute one hundred eighty miles a day. Nancy Erisman>> It's not easy to find a job in this profession that fulfills the needs of the employees that's either full-time or offers benefits or is a quality program or is all of those things. [Film Clip] Paul Vercammen>> Erisman works at UCSB, the largest single site for early childhood care and education in Santa Barbara County. The school's director is currently trying to fill thirteen full-time vacancies for caregivers. One applicant accepted the position, but changed her mind. Leslie Voss>> It's really a shock to them when they arrive. We warn them. If we do a phone interview with someone out of the state, we say, "You might want to go on line first and check out the housing prices in Santa Barbara. They're not what you're used to." Paul Vercammen>> Right now, the waiting list to get into this facility for just infants such as little Kendall has reached one hundred fifty. Leslie Voss>> It's really hard because actually when parents on the phone are in tears, angry, they're trying to make life decisions and childcare is a big piece of that. Paul Vercammen>> So is there any relief in sight? There is. This is the new adjunct childcare center at UC Santa Barbara in the corner of a student resources building under construction. The center is funded in part by student fees. When it opens in early 2007, it will accommodate fifty children. This is where most of UCSB's thirteen new child caregivers will work, but where will they come from? Leslie Voss>> We don't approach employees of other programs directly in order to recruit them. It's not like some other skills. There are no headhunters. Paul Vercammen>> Compounding the problem is the challenge of keeping the caregivers they do manage to recruit. [Film Clip] Leslie Voss>> Many teachers need the field of early childhood who are very qualified and really would prefer to work with children and go into the public school system to work with K through six or higher. Pat Wheatley>> The professional workforce that we have in our community will clearly be aging out, if you will, in years because they are an older professional group and are not playing in the new profession of trained early childhood professionals. Paul Vercammen>> An aging shallow pool of well-trained preschool teachers will be hard to replace. There are two local community colleges that offer a degree in early childhood development, but there's no higher degree to be found. Pat Wheatley>> When you look at what their opportunities are for a Bachelor, Master or PhD candidate, we're looking at a real serious crisis where the opportunities to go and further your education are very limited. Paul Vercammen>> One solution? The new Cal State Channel Islands in neighboring Ventura County is working to add a BA in early childcare and UCSB could follow suit, creating a new stream of trained caregivers. But even if students choose a degree in child development, there is still the relatively low pay that awaits them after graduation. How does that make you feel, actually, that your profession is so under-compensated? Nancy Erisman>> Pretty bad actually. There's not a lot of reward for that. The reward comes from, you know, how you feel about what you do and from the sporadic appreciation from the families and from the interaction with the children and the co-workers. Pat Wheatley>> Early care and education professionals have been under-paid significantly and, as a result, under-trained as to the complexities of childhood development. When we look at eighty percent of the brain development taking place in the first five years, these are crucial years to have the best trained individuals. Paul Vercammen>> In the meantime, Cindy Benelli hopes the new UCSB center will open in February as planned and Kendall will move up on the wait list. Then, with both her children in childcare, Cindy will be able to concentrate on getting her doctorate in economics. Cindy Benelli>> I'm on other wait lists at other daycares and I'm hoping somebody says, yes, we have the space and we'll take you. Even if it's five hours a week at this point, I'll take it. Paul Vercammen>> Paul Vercammen for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> There's an intense debate going on in Washington among military and political leaders. How do we get out of Iraq? Advice is coming from all along the political spectrum, but there's one man, a staunch Republican, that the Bush administration is not eager to hear from. His name is Scott Ritter. He's a former Intelligence officer for the U.S. Marines, a diehard conservative, and a U.N. Weapons Inspector. He's also a sharp thorn in the side of the Bush administration. Why? Because of statements like this. Scott Ritter>> This is a president that's allowed the global war on terror to lead to conditions that represent the defeat, the moral defeat, of the United States of America. That's why I'm against this man because he represents, in my opinion, the biggest threat to the United States of America that exists in the world today. Osama bin Laden is not transforming American society. George W. Bush is, and he's not transforming it for the good. Val Zavala>> Now Ritter has written a book called "Target Iran" which warns about the White House's plan for regime change in Iran. So what would Ritter's exit strategy for Iraq be? He had a chance to lay it out before the Army's elite, the Jedi Knights, he calls them, at the School for Advanced Military Studies in Kansas. Scott Ritter>> But they understand the reality and complexity of Iraq. They know that Iraq isn't, you know, this singular entity. They know that it's broken up into Sunni and Shiite and Kurd and they know that the Sunnis themselves are fractured and the Shiite are fractured and the Kurds are fractured. They know the reality of governance in Baghdad, how difficult it is to have governments leave Baghdad and get into the provinces. They know that there's been a vacuum created with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime that has allowed, you know, al Qaeda and Sunni fundamentalist terrorist groups to take root. They also know that the United States of America, through its continuing occupation of Iraq, is responsible for up to eighty percent of the friction that creates violence, that the biggest problem in Iraq today is the presence of American troops. The key solution is to reduce this friction by withdrawing American troops from Iraq. Also, recognizing that the Iraqi problem is not an American problem in isolation, meaning that it's only about an American solution to Iraq, recognizing that Iraq is part of a region and that Iraq's neighbors have a vested interest in creating a stable, viable Iraq. Not one neighbor, but all neighbors, inclusive of Syria, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan. If you're going to withdraw American forces, there has to be engagement by Iraq's neighbors to seek to contain and stabilize the violence that will continue in Iraq. Remember, withdrawing American forces gets rid of eighty percent of the friction that leads to violence, but there's still that twenty percent factor. That twenty percent factor is big enough and, if left unchecked, could fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal of American troops. So you must have the engagement of Iraq's neighbors. The problem is that the current policy of the Bush administration is such that we refuse to engage two of the critical players in that region who have a vested interest. If I were to put this in a nutshell, we have to talk about the rapid withdrawal of American forces from Iraq coupled with the simultaneous American diplomatic engagement with Iraq's neighbors so that Iraq's neighbors are working within Iraqi social structures to contain and mitigate the Iraq-on-Iraq violence until which time the Iraqi people themselves come up with a solution to unified governance. Val Zavala>> You've written that you believe that the United States war against Iran has already started. What did you mean by that? Scott Ritter>> First of all, we'd start out with the assertions made by the Bush administration about the threat posed by Iran. There is not a time when President Bush speaks of Iran that he doesn't say "the Iranian nuclear weapons program". He speaks of it as if it's a reality, a demonstrated fact. The fact is that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program that can be backed up with fact. There's no evidence that such a program exists. We should at least hit rewind and go back to 2002 where the president was telling us there can be no doubt Saddam Hussein possesses massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. We were told by Dick Cheney there could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has reconstituted his nuclear weapons program and, again, like the compliant sheep we are, every American nodded their head and went, "Oh, yeah", because we were preprogrammed to accept at face value anything negative about Saddam Hussein. Look where it got us. People say we can't be at war with Iran because we don't have American divisions on the ground. Well, war isn't just about putting divisions on the ground. War is conflict, conflict between two nations or a group of nations. When we send reconnaissance aircraft that violates the territorial integrity of Iran, violates their sovereign airspace, that is an act of war. Ask any American what would happen if a Cuban aircraft took off from Cuba and flew over Florida without permission and took photographs of American military installations. We'd shoot them down and we'd accuse them of a provocative act of war. Val Zavala>> At the same time, Iraq's leader has said some pretty provocative anti-American, anti-western things. Scott Ritter>> Oh, yeah. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, said some pretty provocative things, things that are readily condemned. But, again, read the constitution of Iran and you'll recognize that the Iranian president is a figurehead. He's a man who has no power. The genuine power in Iran resides with the theocrats, the religious leaders. That's why we call it a theocracy. If we focus on Ahmadinejad, we'd have to call Iran a democracy because he was democratically elected, but we don't. We rightfully call Iran a theocracy because the system of governance is dominated by a supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, an organization called the Guardian Council and an organization called the Expediency Council. These people control the military, control police, have the ability to declare war, control the nuclear program, not Ahmadinejad. It's these people, the supreme leader and the components of the theocracy, that reached out in 2003 to George W. Bush offering to enter into negotiations over the normalization of relations between the United States and Iran, the negotiated peace settlement with Israel inclusive of a resolution of the Hezbollah problem in South Lebanon and Hamas on the West Bank and to put the nuclear program on the table. George W. Bush rejected this reaching out because, you see, to engage in that kind of responsible discourse with the Iranians would legitimize the very theocracy that you're seeking to remove from power. Val Zavala>> You have an overall view of this administration as being faith-based in this analysis. Scott Ritter>> That's what's happening here. We have a certain group of people in Washington, D.C. that believe that they have been anointed to lead America through these difficult times. They really get scared because, talk about faith-based analysis, these people have been anointed by God. You hear the president himself say that God helped him win this election so that he could be here during this time so he could lead the nation in this time of challenge. You know, I don't mock anybody's religion, but the last time I checked, America was a democracy and not a theocracy. With all due respect to the president, I really don't care what his relationship with God is. I'm more concerned about his relationship with the Constitution and the rule of law. That's what I'm concerned about. Val Zavala>> Scott Ritter, thank you very much for your thoughts and thank you for your book, "Target Iran". Scott Ritter>> Thank you. Val Zavala>> Scott Ritter was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like information on future speakers, you should go to their website at townhall-la.org. And if you disagree with Scott Ritter, we'd love to hear from you. You can post your opinion on our Blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> During World War II, a cameraman was given permission to visit a remote camp in the middle of the Owens Valley, so he grabbed his camera and went to a war relocation camp. That photographer was Ansel Adams and the camp was Manzanar. Now his images are part of a moving exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum. Sam Louie gives us a glimpse. Franklin D. Roosevelt>> "As Commander-in-Chief, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense." Eileen Hirano>> Well, Ansel Adams was very troubled by the policy of the government and their actions through Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate Japanese Americans and felt that it was important for him as a photographer to go and document the lives of the individuals that were in the camp. Sam Louie>> So in 1943, photographer Ansel Adams known for his breathtaking landscapes turned his camera in a different direction and focused instead on the lives of the Japanese living in America. Eileen Hirano>> He wanted to show that Japanese Americans were loyal Americans, that they were like every other American, and that although they were born free and equal, that they were behind barbed wire. Sam Louie>> Adams visited Manzanar, one of ten war relocation camps established by the government during World War II. The camps were designed to imprison Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the west coast. Narrator>> "The great trek begins. A Jap caravan heads for the government's war relocation project in the Owens Valley, a voluntary migration. It's in no sense a concentration camp, but a city with its front yard in the snow-peaked Sierra Nevadas." Eileen Hirano>> You look at the rows of barracks after barracks after barracks. You can imagine ten thousand people confined within a one square mile block out in the middle of the desert. Very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. Sam Louie>> In all, one hundred ten thousand Japanese living in the United States were rounded up and taken to the interment camps spread throughout the country. Manzanar lies in a bitter, bleak and desolate environment about forty miles west of Death Valley. Eileen Hirano>> I think what he found were people that were very determined to make the best of the conditions that they lived in. Sam Louie>> And you can see that determination in the people he photographed, people who helped the country and then imprisoned them. Eileen Hirano>> I think it's remarkable to consider that they were contributing to the war effort because they were farming, but they were taking land that was out in the desert and being able to produce products. They wanted to make the most of the time that they were there. Many of them did work and they were paid a few pennies a day, but nonetheless, they wanted to be productive during the time that they were in the camps. Sam Louie>> Adjusting to life in the camps meant trying to establish a sense of normalcy. To keep themselves productive, there was work, sports and school. Eileen Hirano>> So school was a very important part of their life. They had school clubs. They had school yearbooks. So they tried to recreate as much as they could of what life would be like in a high school or in a middle school outside of camp. Sam Louie>> What about proms or dances? Eileen Hirano>> They did. They had proms and dances. They had sports clubs. They had the normal kinds of activities that one would find in school settings. Sam Louie>> But inside the barracks, life was anything but normal with four families squeezed into a space the size of a one-bedroom apartment. Bed sheets were used as walls for separation. Eileen Hirano>> What you see here is certainly -- this picture occurred in 1943, so it was after they had been in camp for more than a year. But they tried to make their living quarters as homely as possible. It looks like it's around Christmas time. You see a Christmas tree there. Sam Louie>> And not knowing how long they would remain incarcerated, they settled into a rhythm of life. Eileen Hirano>> So if you think about this marker and the lives that were lost when people died of old age or of illnesses, I think it is, in a sense, a forlorn place to have to be buried. But this was a way in which the people that lived there could ensure that there would be a remembrance. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> Meanwhile, outside the camp, World War II was still raging. The United States government looked for extra manpower and asked for help from the Japanese Americans. Close to thirteen hundred from the camp jumped at the chance to serve their country. >> "I volunteered from a relocation center to show my loyalty and to prove that I had the right to live as a good American citizen." Eileen Hirano>> This is a young corporal. He was one of many of those that served in the United States military during the war. His family was incarcerated at Manzanar. If you think of the irony of someone's family being behind barbed wire, having their civil liberties taken away, and yet so many men and women who volunteered to serve in the United States military to fight for their country. Harry Truman>> "You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice and you've won." Sam Louie>> Many were decorated for their service, but the military recognition only went so far. After the war, the Japanese returned home to find that racism and suspicion remained. Eileen Hirano>> Many people say that resettlement was even harder than the camp here because they came back and there was still tremendous prejudice. There was still fear of Japanese Americans, so for the resettlement years, many people didn't have homes to come back to or friends to come back to. Sam Louie> Many were successful farmers before the war and, when they were forced to evacuate, the vast majority sold off their farms for a few cents on the dollar. Eileen Hirano>> Many of the large farms throughout California that were created by Japanese Americans were all lost. So when you think of the millions, which in today's dollars would be billions, that people had to give up and yet they went and they were willing to farm in the desert, is another very important part of the story. Sam Louie>> A story that Ansel Adams made sure was preserved on film for future generations. Val Zavala>> The exhibit, "Ansel Adams at Manzanar", will be up through February 18. For details, you can go to the website which is janm.org. That stands for Japanese American National Museum. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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