quiet may day at berkeley

 

A Quiet May Day at UC Berkeley

 

On May 1st I visited the usual epicenter of violent protest, UC Berkeley. Their participation in the Pro-Palestine/ Israel divestment movement was you could almost say was calm and dignified. Tents stretched for some 50 yards on the grassy area in front of Sproul Hall with an audio tape running of a woman speaking in I assume the language of the Palestinians. Large posters were draped above the main entrance to Sproul Hall proclaiming: “ Free Palestine Encampment Until UC Divests”. Basically this is a divestment movement just like the one that stopped South African apartheid.

Most of the uproar is of media footage of police breaking up the peaceful encampments. Like the Black Lives Matter movement, 90% of the demo-nstrations are totally peaceful. But as in the case of many progressive movements some of the members are loud mouth fools and overstate their case which the media always seizes on. Recall the foolish calls to 'defund the police' which the media repeated ad nauseam and the right-wingers got so much mileage out of.

Nicholas Kristrof in his a recent NY Times column makes a valid point with respect to the short term efficacy of campus protest. It will not change Biden's (and the US in general) cozy relationship with Israel. But history is about the long run not the short run. In 1968 presidntial election Nixon was certainly helped by the Silent Majority's reaction to the anti-war movement as well as no one on the political left (including us as college students) wanted to vote for the Democratic Party's Hubert Humphrey and his support of the Viet Nam war. However I did (grudgingly) vote for him as I felt the Democratic Party's domestic policy would be better than that of Nixon and the always reactionary GOP. Sound familiar? And in 2024 we will have to vote for Biden regardless of his unconscionable support of Israel's horrendous literal overkill (34,000+ vs 1200) policy in Gaza . This nationwide college campus protest movement is historical. The media always reacts to the immediate drama of events and only deals with them in depth after the fact. I don't recall the so called 'establishment' being particularly supportive of Martin Luther King and his cohort while they were being attacked by dogs and fire hoses. It was just news then.

Much of the current uproar and chaos is occurring at universities that are dependent on wealthy donors who apparently support Israel's brutal overreaction in Gaza. State supported public schools seem to be less apt to call in the tact squad at least in California's UC system. The ruckus at UCLA was not caused by the protesters but by the counter-protesters violently attacking them.

Unfortunately the NYTimes has been tacitly supportive of Biden's clumsy and contradictory support (armaments for the IDF and food for its victims) of war criminal Bibi Netayahu. And as usual most of the mainstream media takes its lead from the Graylady.

And as Kurt Vonnegut used to end his novels - 'so it goes'.