One state, two different protests

UCLA protests made me think about ANOTHER California protest - and how things have changed.

When that noted party animal George Santayana wrote this particular sentence: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” in his 1905 book “The Life of Reason,” he had no idea his words would carry through the years. But it was a helluva idea, one that would echo. Somebody somewhere today will probably write it. Besides me, I mean.

If only Clark Kerr had been able to listen for an echo. Or if he was alive to take a long look across his state and the UCLA campus this morning, where swarms of police and plywood sheets and flash-bangs and utter ugliness and campus chaos took over our TV screens this morning.

It was 80 years ago – imagine that – when Kerr, then University President of UCal-Berkeley, a campus that was about to be upended in one of the most famous student demonstrations in American history, stepped to a microphone and sounded annoyed.

 “One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful,” he said then. “In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints. Almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.”

There was no echo to his words, was there? He sounded like another haughty academic egghead (and not to be mean but the guy was bald as a billiard) someone who was irritated that these loud-mouthed students, insisting on their First Amendment right to protest and assemble, were ticked off because political activities (protesting the Vietnam War) had been banned on campus.

Mark Krichell’s 1990 film “Berkeley In The Sixties,” a superb documentary on the Free Speech Movement that turned the Berkeley campus upside down for a few days in 1964, was fascinating and at the same time, troubling.

Growing up in pastoral New Hampshire, though only about an hour north of the home of the architect of Civil Disobedience – Concord, Massachusetts where Henry David Thoreau wrote his essay, the only student protest I ever saw was about seven of my Rivier College seniors, standing outside the Administration building when they learned that Administration had decided that graduation would be at the high school instead of on our campus. They made this decision without consulting the student council.

Writing for the student newspaper, “Perspectives”, I wrote a humorous Catch-22 like paragraph of circular logic “The situation with graduation will be resolved once the graduation situation is deal with.” Something like that. Wasn’t that big a deal to me.

But seeing these tent-like structures erupting all over the nation’s campuses, purportedly over what’s happening in the Middle East between Gaza and Israel – though you wonder if there are other more insidious elements underneath all this – is indeed troubling and scary and evidently, a big deal to a lot of college students and apparently, agitators/activists coming out of the woodwork.

Or is it? On the one hand, across our country, it looks like liberalism, left-wingers run amok. “Shut them up, send them home. We want law and order. And we want it now.”

 On the other, as Mario Savio sang out “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you sick at hear that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop!”

Are these protests amplified and sparked from within by right-wing, MAGA folks who figure, probably correctly, that depicting a country out of control will turn us toward an authoritarian leader, someone who’d be delighted to turn America into a police state, somebody who seems to be spending a lot of time in courtrooms.

Or are these young people genuinely inspired by the struggles, injustice, cruelty and absolute horror we’re seeing across the water. (And nobody seems to be bringing up Ukraine!) We should do something, shouldn’t we?

Watching “Berkeley In The Sixties” was revelatory to me. Amidst the chaos, there was idealism. Students standing on police cars talking about Aristotle and Plato and justice and fairness and human rights and what kind of a society they wanted to be a part of and what a university education should be about. Sit-ins and teach-ins and talking and discussing and exchanging ideas. There was, it seemed to me, a point.

If these collective groups of students are merely “repeating the past” as Santayana suggested, we’d probably be OK. It’ll pass. If there are other, more sinister reasons, we may have a lot more to worry about than George Santayana, Clark Kerr, free speech and uh, you know, democracy.