Being born in 1971, I grew up hearing the stories of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the Hippie Movement, the rise of Acid Rock and Free Jazz, SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), and later learned from my professors at Sonoma State University about that famous speech made by Mario Savio on the steps of Sprawl Hall at UC Berkeley:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
Well, I certainly don't need my Vietnam veteran father or my post hippie mother - who is about to earn her Master of Social Work degree - to tell me that the machine has indeed become so odious. I am "sick at heart", and I "can't take part". Well, not in good conscience anyway. Savio says that when the machine becomes that odious that you "can't even passively take part." Boy do I love that sentiment, the idea that things have become so rotten in this country that those of us with conscience cannot even pretend to take part, to passively go about our days and nights as though the things being done in our name by our supposedly elected government do have some kind of justice interwoven within them. While I, for one, can very confidently and undoubtedly say that "the machine" has indeed reached that level of odiousness, if you will, I cannot really see around me anything close to the level of civic participation that I grew up hearing about from my mother and father. Why is that? Am I out of touch? I don't think so, seeing as how I myself have spent more than a few hours in a jail cell recently as a result of exercising my right to free speech. But where are the Mario Savio's of today? I Sprawl Hall at UC Berkeley starting to be an epicenter of creative backlash from the youth again? I'm not so sure. My dad once (well, actually about twenty times) told me this story about when he was in his 20's, before he got drafted into Vietnam, and was selling encyclopedias. Most of the guys he was working with were White, including the sales managers that sent them out in car loads to sell the books all over the Los Angeles area. My dad got this crazy idea that if he could get "a few Black dudes" to come work on his crew, they could go out to the mostly Black neighborhoods and sell encyclopedias. You see, back then, not only were the Black neighborhoods pretty much off limits for White folks for obvious reasons, but we have to remember this was the America of the 1950's and 60s, where White encyclopedia sales companies didn't even attempt to sell to Black families. Let's not go into why, for you can use your imagination there. Anyway, my dad frequently hung out with Black people, partially as a result of his musical tastes, but also because he was heavily involved the anti-war and civil rights movements and whatever other trouble he could get into with his radical friends. He figured that since he, a "White boy" was perfectly fine going into Black neighborhoods, that he could make a mint on his encyclopedia sales even if he only sold one set every few block or so. After all, there would be no competition, right? And so it was. My dad got a few Black guys hired on to his crew and they went out into all the neighborhoods his boss told him not to go and quickly became the top selling encyclopedia salesman at that company. Then he got drafted into the Vietnam War not too far into the future. The point of that little story about my dad is this: The willingness of a White kid from Oklahoma City to put himself right into the thick of one of the most contentious movements in American history is reminiscent of a very different time than that which we live in today. And it doesn't stop at White people or Black people engaging with cultures that don't match their own. It goes much deeper, to the issue of social, political, and civic participation. The civil actions of today rarely involve risk taking. This is, in my mind, partially because we all know that the police of today look more like the National Guard of yesterday, and they are not afraid, nor warned against by the powers that be, to engage in guilty until proven innocent violence against otherwise non-violent protesters. If you need exemplification of that concept, just type in "RNC Protests 2008" and check out the video footage. The short version is that people are scared to death of actually engaging in civil disobedience, because under today's laws (thanks to George W. Bush and our whimpy-assed Congress) if you break any kind of law or direction of the police while "peacefully gathering", you can be detained for just about anything without any charge. So, this brings me to the penultimate question of this blog post: Do people today actually know the difference between "peaceful protest" and "civil disobedience"? While I'm sure it's a bit of a rhetorical question, as look around, two things are clear to me; This historical moment in America is marked by a supreme necessity to engage in disobedience, and secondly, I don't see the disobedience. I see a lot of peaceful actions, usually in the form of protest marches that are permitted by the local police departments; marches "escorted" by the police themselves as a matter of fact. Occasionally, a few folks will get arrested for stopping traffic, something a friend of mine and I did recently, but it's really just a sacrificial lamb kind of thing, in an attempt to get the mainstream media to cover the event. What I don't see is the taking over of buildings on college campuses, unpermitted and secretly organized sit-ins, shutting down of television and radio stations, human blockades in front military bases, and so on. Sure, they might be perking up a bit, especially since the 2008 RNC protests when the Twin Cities made it damn clear that is indeed an underground anti-capitalist movement, but there has been nothing like the groups that emerged in the mid to late 1960's. The question to all of this is why? Why are we not seeing the kind of rage and boots on the ground action that we saw in times past? Arguments could be made all over the place. We could blame it on the corporatization of the mainstream media, the lack of independent music being played on mainstream radio (also an outcome of corporatization), the lack of relevant and public discourse, thanks to Americans' insatiable thirst for television. I don't know, there's all kinds of reasons, but they are really just excuses for not doing what Mario Savio so eloquently urged us to do back in 1965.
"You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
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