the Dumpster Muffin was a lousy lay.

but Hi!

Please post your PowerPoint or whatever you’ll be presenting when you’re finished. Spare nothing, but also… try to be objective and diplomatic. I know it would be very hard for me to do so on this issue.

Dumpster Muffin

I think that the public face of the protest was a farce, many of these people are in fact insane. But the people up the hill were really the ones that put up the real legal objections and kept the trees standing. There was a lot of fervor up there. I suggest reading the EIR available somewhere through calbears.com and the public comments of people, some are entertaining, but it gives a good snapshot of the people that actually held up construction and allowed the over publicized ridiculousness continue.

Why Can’t Radicals Just Protest One Thing?

The inability causes real damage to their issues (all of them): The anti-war movement never took off in much of the country precisely because many Americans (myself included), who would have been happy to march against the war per se, were not interested in marching about the war/Israel/racism/school reform/death penalty/free trade/Free Mumia!

We stayed home, and didn’t try to hold our own rallies because we knew that those people would show up and accuse us of not being anti-war enough because we eat meat.

The radicals respond (though not in an organized fashion) that all of these issues are interrelated: That the systemic dynamics of oppression manifest in multiple ways and that it’s this fundamental dynamic that must be opposed all at once – in Palestine, in Greece, in San Francisco, and everywhere else.

The result is the creation of what I’ve called the “liberal ur-issue,” wherein everything we don’t like is seen to be exactly equivalent of, or even identical to, everything else we don’t like. It’s all one thing.

In their minds, they’re not just protesting the trees being knocked down. They’re protesting everything at once.

You might want to consider exploring comparisons to the People’s Park protests of the 1970s. The Free Speech Movement started as a generally a principled and legitimate protest. The subsequent anti-war movement, although it got more out of hand, had at its core a very real and profound issue. But the People’s Park protests which came next were a lot like the tree-sitter protests. They weren’t really about anything except protest for the sake of protest. The real issues were over, but the protesters had the taste for the power and publicity and pleasure they got from protesting, and they wouldn’t let go. They didn’t know how to live any other way, so they looked for a new issue to protest and found one. People’s Park, like the trees, was a silly issue, unworthy of the Free Speech Movement or the anti-war movement.

I came to Berkeley not too long after the last of the major People’s Park riots, but we still had the occasional smaller upheaval over the “park.” By that time the “park” had become gross, full of drug dealers and violence and people defacating and urinating all over the place. No one I knew ever even went near the place, because it was really scary. But there was a hard-core of non-students who make it their mission to “preserve” the glory of People’s Park and keep the University from building anything there or putting it to any use whatsoever. The tree-sitters have always seemed to me to be the natural continuation of the People’s Park phenomenon which, at least during the years I lived in Berkeley (1977-1984) was a part of the fabric of Berkeley that one just had to accept to live there. I agree that the tree-sitters were a caricature of the Free Speech and anti-war movements, but so were the People’s Park protesters. So, are the tree-sitters really a departure from Berkeley’s history of protest, or were the Free Speech and anti-war movements the exceptions?

If you haven’t watched it, take a look at the documentary “Berkeley in the Sixties” which has interviews with a large number of people who were seriously invovled in the different protest movements. They generally acknowledge the pointlessness and cynicism of the People’s Park protests, and how the protest ethos had already degenerated by the early 1970s.

Also, mention something about trees.

Which is a good hook, although it’s of course just going to spark an endless argument about which protest, or protesters qualified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

So set that up as a strawman, and go ahead and find examples of protests you approve of, or think the community of Berkeley as a whole was well represented in, then you bring in the tree-sitter protest as the current event example and bring up all the reactions and opinions to it (including the sort of premise you have – how most of this was a crappy BS protest) and then open the discussion of why such a black and white view of any protest or movement oversimplifies it.

Be the objective moderator in the end, as opposed to one who has pre-judged, and hopefully your audience will respect you, and be closer to making their own, now-better-informed judgments.

The great posts above on People’s park are a good example of the complexity of things we may distantly remember and put a simple label on…

You may also want to be prepared for hecklers in your audience – what would you do with an attempt to disrupt your presentation?