Revisitation Rights

Video surfaced this afternoon from the latest wave of inane student-led protests in Berkeley of members of the University of California Police Department jabbing protesters with batons. It's first worth noting that objectively, accounts of the November Massacre have been exaggerated in two ways. First, the purportedly angelic protestors were plenty hostile themselves, and if they were warned to back off, showed no intention of doing so. Second, referring to the underhand thrusts of the points of the batons as "police brutality" is an insult of the victims of real excessive force: a navel bruised - no matter how thoroughly - doesn't remotely compare to the broken bones the LAPD has become notorious for handing out. That said, this was clearly egregiously inappropriate behavior, and you'll be hard pressed to ever find me standing up for the UCPD, who time and again have proven an insult to real police nationwide.

My main purpose in this brief return from the dead was to offer the following choice image as a follow-up on old posts about the last two and a half years of extended "civil disobedience":

As the price of education inevitably continues to rise and students spend more and more days skipping their own classes and disrupting others at campuses across the country (my own included), I've been left wondering what exactly it is that they're looking for. A good number of them, of course, are socialists, whose arguments that the eradication of capitalism would result in an efficient, even distribution of wealth and an end to unemployment indicate that they've never looked into the histories of China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union, or Vietnam. Others are satisfied with the idea of capitalism but repulsed by the lack of taxation thrown at the cream of the crop. (Side note: the IRS reports that in 2009 the top ~0.7% of the country paid ~30.32% of the nation's total income taxes, and that they paid an average of 28.8% of their income in taxes compared to 11.6% for the rest of the country - a number which drops down to 10.4% not including the $200-500K households that make up another 2.3% of income tax filers.) Others that I've talked to don't know what the solution is to the financial crisis they find themselves in, they just know it needs to be fixed and that their voices have the right to be heard.

Ultimately, the only common theme I've been able to draw from the demonstrations is that people are tired of life being unfair. I sympathize with them. College degrees aren't automatically worth jobs anymore, as a consequence of the unprecedentedly high modern rate of college attendance. Healthcare is a more pressing concern now than ever before, because our population is larger and an unprecedented majority of Americans fully intend to live past 65 (requiring ever-spiraling costs for unprecedentedly complex healthcare procedures). The challenges of contemporary living could fill an entire post, to no purpose.

In the end, I see two possible solutions for individual students. One is to accept that life is as difficult as it always has been, and to pursue an expensive and potentially unpleasant load of continued schooling to ensure future employment, taking solace in the knowledge that the enormous majority of the lauded 99% is literate, has access to food, water, shelter, and vaccinations, and is protected from the marauding bands of murderers, rapists, and even kidnappers that so much of the world has to live in daily fear of. The second is to "speak your voice" along with the rest of the herd - the majority of which is as empty-headed and self-interested as the occasional policeman that jabs first and asks questions later. I lived in Berkeley long enough to know it will always choose the latter, using the grainy, black-and-white icon of Saint Savio to cover or accentuate whatever motives really do lie beneath. I like to think that a slim minority can see through the sound and fury and are doing their best to plan as best they can for what perpetuity has shown will be a challenging future.