As Occupiers seem to know, the crackdown– tents torn down, books and personal belongings confiscated, the arrests, the cowardly pepper spraying at UC Davis—none of this is a defeat. On the contrary, forcing the powers-that-be to show their hand is the biggest victory so far. Almost certainly the 1% didn’t want to resort to police force. They hoped the movement would die of attrition.
Those who are well served by the status quo always prefer to operate quietly under the camouflage of such ideas as Newt Gingrich’s putdown of the “1% vs 99%” Occupy rallying cry the other day at Harvard: “I think we are 100 percent. We are all Americans,” Just one big happy capitalist family. Love it or leave it.
During an occupation in 1968 of Stanford University’s student union, I learned a basic lesson that had somehow been left out of the official curriculum, about the nature of the university itself. In those days we called it a consciousness-raising moment.
Naïve as it may sound, in my leisurely progress through graduate school I had never thought of the university as owned. It was an august institution of higher learning, above and beyond the pettiness of private property. As it said itself in the idealistic language of the catalog, it was all about the noble pursuit of truth that went on in classrooms between teachers and students. In that sense, we were the university. We spoke proprietorially about “our university. ” It was our “alma mater” (invoking a most intimate family connection) to which as a loyal alum we would be expected to contribute financially.
Such were my ideas when, along with hundreds of other idealistic students, I occupied the student union building to protest the university’s suspension of anti-CIA protesters. For a few days we made exhilarating use of this impromptu classroom. Amidst a mess of sleeping bags and fast food containers, education went on nonstop at a furious rate about, among many things, the war- related research conducted on our campus despite our widespread opposition to the war. The truth would make us free.
Packard of Hewlett-Packard , already a powerful company in that pre-Silicon Valley era, and a trustee of the university, dropped by to praise us for our youthful passion, however wrongheaded, and paternalistically ruffled the hair of our leader.
A day or two later we found out who owned the university we had thought of as ours. We found out when Packard and the other trustees, having tired of indulging us, called the cops to kick us out, to arrest us if necessary.
Of the consciousness-raising that went on during those few days that lesson about whose university it was and how far they would go to resist change was the most impressive. Sic the cops on their own students? Who could have imagined such a thing until it happened? It was not a lesson the university powers actually wanted taught in any classroom. Such a clear contradiction of the high-minded rhetoric of the catalog and fundraising pitches was not a reality they wanted to reveal.
I was about to get my degree and leave for my first teaching job in another university and that last, dramatic lesson, though not part of the curriculum, gave new shape and impetus to my teacher career.
The nakedness of the emperor is naked power, the billy club, tear gas, taser or gun (Kent State just a couple of years away) under the flowing robes and funny hats worn at graduation time.
Those were heady times, but the movement of the ‘sixties was terminally hobbled by so much of the energy being generated by the focus on the war, by so many of protesters being students with brighter- than -average prospects in an expanding economy once they got by the draft.
The connection to capitalism was never firmly established in the public mind and popular media. The emperor was never seen as clearly then as now, in this time of widely publicized Wall St. hanky-panky, widespread unemployment and foreclosures cutting across classes and generations, and the spot-on focus of “we are the 99%.”
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