For What It's Worth

The conditions conspired on behalf of my ignorance. Last night, as another small riot paraded through Telegraph, I was a mere four blocks away, yet nestled in a small, crowded room in a friend’s apartment, playing boisterous poker. This morning, though Telegraph looked like a mess, it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary – especially given the winds foretelling the storm that would shortly rage, which by noon were already strong enough that they were hurling trash cans across the Bancroft sidewalks. All things considered, then, there was no reason for me to expect that another parade of self-righteous Berkeleyites had trashed Southside yesterday, even though I’d effectively been there during and after; it was left to Facebook to raise my ire.

To summarize, courtesy (shudder) of the Daily Cal: “A crowd of more than 200 people swarmed the streets of Southside early Friday morning in a riot involving six law enforcement agencies, runaway dumpsters, flaming trash cans, shattered windows and violent clashes between rioters and police.” The aftermath added up to only two arrests: Marika Goodrich, a 28-year-old senior, charged with assault on a police officer, inciting a riot and resisting arrest ($32,500 bail), and 26-year-old Berkeley alumnus Zachary Miller, charged with inciting a riot, resisting arrest and obstructing a police officer ($22,500).

The disorder began with an occupation of Durant Hall, once the home of the East Asian Library and soon to become office space for L&S. To get in, the “occupiers” broke a few locks; once inside, they broke some windows, applied some graffiti, and scattered some construction equipment. They chose Durant Hall with the idea that they would “reclaim it for students”. A brief pause here. It’s presumably safe to say that none of these people had ever set foot in the East Asian Library – even in its expansive new location, much less its cramped old ones in Durant Hall – because if any of them had ever done so, they wouldn’t have been laboring under the false impression that it had been anything to “reclaim for students.” In fact, it was a squat, poorly ventilated, ugly edifice with inadequate access to bathrooms; further, as a library, it had never exactly been the hangout spot they’re making it out to be. Another sad consideration in that the best these political heroes could do was a fenced-off, hollowed-out building whose year-long construction was bemoaned by anyone at Berkeley only because it meant you could no longer cut through the low road past Dwinelle on your way to the west side of campus. But I digress.

From there, our fearless leaders moved to the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph, where one of their number – presumably in a desperate act of compensation for a laughably small set of genitals – broke windows at Subway around 1:40 AM. The mob settled at Durant and Telegraph.

Police on the scene included “[o]fficers from UCPD, Oakland, BART and the California Highway Patrol, in addition to all but four Berkeley Police Department officers on duty that night.” They made a line in front of the Bank of America, and watched as the crowd, gathering momentum, pushed a dumpster into the intersection and set it on fire. The Berkeley Fire Department and Blakes employees cooperated to put the fire out.

The mob then threw glass bottles, plastic buckets, pizza and other objects at the police line, in between call-and-response exchanges of “Whose street? Our street!” Its leader, if anyone, was a shopping cart with a stereo in it, whose movements dictated the movements of the mob. In a similar display of missing touch with reality, the crowd ghost rode the whip alongside a white Dodge Charger, apparently blissfully unaware it was February, 2010. It was finally dispersed shortly after 3 AM by cop cars, after sending two dumpsters riding down Durant Ave. toward police.

Throughout, as our Mario Savio wannabes wandered, destroying private property in their wake, they offered choice epithets for the cops on the scene: “assholes,” “fucking pigs,” and other clichés of middle-class suburban unrest. To offer an idiom that would sail tellingly far over the heads of these troglodytes, sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.

All signs indicate that this petulant display of destruction will serve primarily as a warm-up for next week, when more large-scale rallies are expected in protest of the fee hikes. For now, the justifications will, of course, be the same as before. The responsible parties will offer either that desperate times call for desperate measures, or simply that there was nothing wrong with what they did, at all. This is all one can really expect from this crowd, the fists and testicles of the proverbial body responsible for Berkeley’s response to these fee hikes. The time has come to take the blame to the source: the brain.

In class this week, one of my wishy-washier professors (not herself a bad person, it should be emphasized) likened the wave of Berkeley protests to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It’s people like this that claim that these repeated instances of violence in response to the fee hikes are examples of a legitimate form of protest taken to an extreme by radicals. Yet really, it is they – and their ridiculously lofty rhetoric – that enable this sort of behavior.

This crusade is nothing like the Civil Rights movement. That was a group of minorities seeking the legal rights to which they were justly entitled by the Constitution: not a “just” cause, but a right cause, one to which there was no justifiable alternative, legally or morally, to taking direct action. This is a group of entitled post-adolescents (and others who should be way too old to qualify for this category, but aren’t) protesting fee hikes at a school whose tuition – even after the hikes – is still an unqualified bargain relative to other schools of its caliber. Now, this isn’t to say that the University doesn’t need to take drastic steps to remodel its finances. (And let the record show that I regularly feel guilty forcing my parents to endure a semester of yet higher tuition fees this Spring.) However, the simple truth of the matter is that the Chancellor’s reluctance to dig into his slush fund to keep fees low is not the reason fees are being raised. It’s because UC Berkeley is morbidly obese.

The mazes of paperwork and bureaucracy that Berkeley runs on puts Office Space’s Initech to shame. It has positions like a “Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion.” It has a student senate that absorbs funding like a sponge, one which has an External Affairs VP and feels compelled to offer statements of solidarity with the victims of the Darfur Genocide. Most of those who make arguments like that detailed two paragraphs back retort that a progressive university needs institutions like these to keep it running. They could be right (they aren’t, but that’s a different story), but Berkeley isn’t a “progressive” university – it’s a public university. In a state like California, this necessarily means limited funds to run an enormous school. Period.

By raising the conflict over the fee hikes to something more noble than it actually is, the “brain” of the movement has made no progress, and actually, moved backwards. Certainly, there’s been no movement towards lowering fees; the only thing that it’s clearly accomplished has been enabling the imbeciles of the movement to indulge their destructive impulses. If Berkeley’s populist intelligentsia truly wants to lead the rest of the state forwards towards an ideal California, they need to begin by holding themselves accountable for the angry sheep their follow them blindly, instead of merely apologizing for them. Until then, I think the ASUC should divert some of its slush fund to helping the proprietors of Subway fix their windows, and I hope we see many more than two people rightfully arrested next week if any more property is destroyed. Otherwise, I’ll have to start calling for a lobotomy.