Dear UCSC Representatives:

Our student fees have increased once again.  Just last quarter, my parents had trouble getting my student payments together, and this resulted in a hold on my classes.  Now I have to crash my three vital classes for the winter quarter, as they are already full.  I understand that our payments for education are necessary, but with such high tuition, I begin to wonder where the money is going.  How can I be sure that my family’s hard-earned dollars are going towards a positive future in our education system?  In this letter I only ask this: that our money be well-spent!

Teachers are of the highest concern, and all professors should be awarded good salaries and benefits.

The new building on campus should be practicing sustainable measures: install efficient solar panels on exposed roofs; use recycled materials whenever possible; install low-watt lighting through all school buildings; architecturally design new structures to have naturally good insulation (like many of the new UCSD buildings).

More campus gardens should be started, with classes responsible for cultivation, moving towards the campus providing much of its own food.  The food eaten and thrown away from dining halls should be used in compost to enrich the garden soil.

Install an area on campus where paper can be recycled, pulped, and re-pressed into useable sheets.  The school could even sell the paper back to students at a cheap price for a buy-back on their investment.

Increase funding to our graduate programs.  They are the ones making breakthroughs.

Continue to offer a wide variety of majors and minors instead of cutting them.  And please don’t raise our student fees again if none of these measures are being taken.

Thank you for your time.
Elan Saltman
Student at UC Santa Cruz

A New Path

Support
Saving
Sovereignty
Surmise
Sustainability.
Silent
Sunrays,
Significant
Solar,
Suddenly
Serenity.
Sufficient
Supply,
Surplus
of sky.

Dreaming of a future where nature won’t die.
When will evolution succeed?

by Jeremy Parker
UCSC Sophomore, Biology

I groan with loans.
The low drone of tuition’s tone has blown
Into my zone, a stinking cyclone of debt cologne.
I am thrown, prone and alone, into stone
So cold and unknown my own bones moan.
I cannot compete, cannot condone the well-known
Storm of the Leone trombone.
The crone has shown I must postpone
(Disown!) my dreams…
It seems the schemes of the supreme regime
Have flowed downstream to the extreme.

I scream.

As a middle-class white male, the tuition fee hike will not bar me from going to college. But it will increase my loans to an ungodly amount. The fee raise has been long coming, but for people like me who qualify for hardly any financial aid, it’s an oppressive weight that will take decades to pay off. This poem is meant to reflect the announcement of the fee hike, and what it means to me when it goes into effect. I understand the state’s economy is no one-person’s failure, but the collective mistakes of individuals in authoritative positions have finally flowed downstream onto us, the students.

And paying more to cover someone else’s mistakes is unacceptable.

by Z’ev X Jenerik, UCSC

Beepbeepbeep
Beepbeepbeep
beepbeepSLAM

John pulled his cold hand back under the covers and groaned.  Similar groans emanated from the three other beds in the small dormitory.  One by one, each of the students crawled out of their bed into the brisk, seven-o’clock air that seeped through the room’s windows.  John put on a dirty shirt and a pair of unwashed pants, which were all he had until he could find the spare change to wash his laundry.  Anthony stood at the room’s communal mirror combing his hair into a respectable shape.  Joshua dug out his toothbrush and went to clean the foul taste out of his mouth.  Eric sat down at his computer and continued writing the essay he had left the night before.

All four boys lived together on campus at UC Santa Cruz.  John’s parents made just enough in combined income to pay for most of John’s fees, but their family relied on the school to cover the financial gap.  Anthony’s mother was a schoolteacher raising three kids on her own.  Both Joshua and Eric’s parents were on unemployment, having been laid off recently.

The boys had all applied for scholarships, but only Joshua and Anthony had been lucky enough to receive any money.  Eric had to take out loans that would put him close to a hundred thousand dollars in debt by the time he got out of college.  Joshua had to take out loans to cover the rest of his financial gap.  Anthony had to work two jobs in addition to being a full time student in order to make it through college.  And John had to take the maximum amount of credits as well as work-study so he could spend as little time in college as possible.

Anthony and John walked with one another to the front door and out into the cold, dim morning light.  Outside, the faint sound of sirens could be heard from the direction of the campus entrance.

“Great,” muttered Anthony.  “More students blocking the school entrance in protest against the fee raises.”

“What are you going to do about them?” asked John.

“Ignore them.  They’ll get removed by the cops eventually, just like every other demonstration that students try against those who can make executive decisions.”

“I was talking about the fee raises.”

“Oh.  I think I’ll have to get another job, keep applying for scholarships, and beg the school to take off some of the burden.  You?”

“I’ll try for scholarships too, but because my parents make just enough money for me to not be financially eligible for anything, I’ll probably have to take out loans and take summer courses while I work my ass off to get money for next year.”

Both boys were silent, listening to the ringing of far-off sirens.

“Dude, why can’t the state just give us money and we wouldn’t have to go through all of this?” asked John of no one in particular.

“Because,” Anthony said.  “The state feels it is more important to fund jails than schools, and the government feels it is more important to fund the killing of people in the Middle East than to fund public education.”

“Doesn’t the state get that the less people in school, the more people in jail, and by taking our money, they’re making the need for more prisons?”

“Come on, John.  Have you ever known the government to do what’s best for the students?  And for the people?”

John was silent. In the meantime, Joshua had exited the building behind them and walked up to Anthony and John.

“What you guys up to?” Joshua asked.

“Whining about the fee raises,” answered John.  “What are you planning on doing to raise the extra money?”

“I’ll have to try and get a job, and if that fails, take out another loan or two.  I don’t even know what Eric’s going to do.  That guy can’t take out any more loans and the school’s already refused him financial aid.”

“Yeah,” added Anthony.  “The school doesn’t have any money any more, ’cause the state stopped giving our public school public funds.”

“That’s what I’m on about,” said Joshua, throwing his hands in the air.  “We all pay taxes, right?  So why doesn’t our tax money go towards public education?”

“Because,” John answered, matter-of-factly.  “They would rather line their pockets and shoot other people than make sure ‘we the people’ of this nation grow up educated and able to be productive, happy citizens.  Why would the people in charge care about any of us?  The people who make the rules individually have more money than all three of our families combined.  They can sip champagne in hot tubs and eat expensive food every day while we rack up debt and break our backs just to get a public education.”

“Yep,” agreed Joshua.

“Uh-huh,” said Anthony, nodding his head.

The siren continued to wail its woeful tune in the distance.  Each of the three boys could feel its sorrowful song echoing their own despair.

by Jeremy Parker
UCSC Sophomore, Biology

I groan with loans.
The low drone of tuition’s tone has blown
Into my zone, a stinking cyclone of debt cologne.
I am thrown, prone and alone, into stone
So cold and unknown my own bones moan.
I cannot compete, cannot condone the well-known
Storm of the Leone trombone.
The crone has shown I must postpone
(Disown!) my dreams…
It seems the schemes of the supreme regime
Have flowed downstream to the extreme.

I scream.

As a middle-class white male, the tuition fee hike will not bar me from going to college. But it will increase my loans to an ungodly amount. The fee raise has been long coming, but for people like me who qualify for hardly any financial aid, it’s an oppressive weight that will take decades to pay off. This poem is meant to reflect the announcement of the fee hike, and what it means to me when it goes into effect. I understand the state’s economy is no one-person’s failure, but the collective mistakes of individuals in authoritative positions have finally flowed downstream onto us, the students.

And paying more to cover someone else’s mistakes is unacceptable.

To the Regents

by Veronica Glover, vglover@ucsc.edu

I’m so sad.
do you want to know why?
I go to the same school as a really hot guy.

But come winter quarter he won’t be around.
Fee hikes, student strikes, and turmoil abound.

We used to cuddle in the library,
but shortened hours started cock-blocking me.

Aside from that, I’m stressed out at home.
My parent can’t seem to help me get loans.

My next bill is due December 17th
I’m so worried I can barely think.

Maybe I’ll get a job and turn my focus away
From my college life because I need money.

You have no right to do this to me.
How dare you make school harder than it needs to be?

This Christmas I’ll ask Santa Claus for financial aid.
I hope it’s not all just so the Regents get paid.

I’m poor as heck and I don’t know what to do,
But I’m not alone. This is hurting my friends too.

And we blame you.

I am not writing for myself.

Thanks to financial aid, my family’s contribution stays the same as the grants that support me grow. It’s Thanksgiving and so I give thanks for these grants, thanks that my father doesn’t make enough as a single parent to put me through college, thanks that the economy has killed his business, that self-employed artists and technicians and directors and producers and photographers and writers are a dying breed. Thanks that in order to get financial aid, I spend hours filling out a form and spend months worrying that maybe this time, I won’t get the aid I need. Thanks that I sell my soul away to selective services. But I’m thankful that there’s no draft and that I’m a girl so none of that matters.

I am thankful for these grants because they’ve given me a chance to go to college. I’ve only been here a year and a quarter but I’ve learned so much, and I’m not just talking about classes, though I’ve had some amazing ones. I’m thankful to be here at UC Santa Cruz where I can take a walk whenever I want through the forest that surrounds my dorm, where I can climb trees and explore caves. At this campus there is always more to discover. I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful I didn’t end up going to an urban university or something so small and painfully suburban that it creates its own landscape out of concrete and meticulously-maintained lawns. Being here, I have changed so much through my experiences. I’ve made memories with the people I’ve met here. I’ve gotten the chance to become more independent and live on my own. I am thankful for all this, and more, but I will stop before this becomes a love letter for my university.

I spent this Thanksgiving with my little cousins. I say little, but they’re almost grown now. And I wonder, will they be able to get a chance like mine? Maybe they don’t have much money either, but their parents are still married and they own a big house instead of renting a little one. It’s different, though, because they live in a suburb, where things are cheaper. But location isn’t taken into account when you’re filling out the FAFSA. It’s not taken into account that my grandparents helped my aunt and uncle buy their house, just that they own a house and thus it’s property. So what will happen to my little cousins?

What about the student who doesn’t get financial aid or grants that fluctuate with every new “fee” thrown at us? (I’m about to look into some kind of class-action lawsuit here, because no matter what they call it, $10,000 is not some small fee, it’s tuition, which is unconstitutional for public higher education in California.) Anyway, what about the student who can’t afford their own public education? The student in the margins of a class structure. For a paper, I was looking up the different classes in terms of economic wealth. Did you know there’s no middle class? Sure, there’s upper middle class and lower middle class, but that really just means upper and lower class since there is no middle middle class. So what about the people who fall between? Do they just slip through the cracks of society?

No learning, no memories, no independence. No growing up. I wonder what happens to children who never learn to grow up? Who never get that critical lesson in independence? Ever heard the word “adultescence?” Adultescents are everywhere. If my thinking is correct, individuals make up society. In that case, we are socially screwed. Try running the United States with a bunch of irresponsible lawmakers who never learned how to be independent from their parents. I guess that wouldn’t happen, though, because there would always be people rich enough at the top of the structure to fork over the exorbitant amounts of cash necessary to pay for college. Then we’d be split even further apart.

I am aware I’m complaining without providing any real solutions. Okay, fine. I could spout all the things you already know. About Prop 13, about the budget, about the two-thirds majority. I know you’ve heard all that. You’ve probably heard about this too but it’s worth much more attention than it has received. We need to look at the problems of society to see why we have more prisoners in California than in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined. Lack of education, lack of chances. Stop spending the money on keeping nonviolent offenders away from the rest of us and put it to creating a society in which everyone is given a chance so there is no need for prisons. Instead of sentencing us to the rest of our lives, show us an education and we’ll show you a society in which bars are no longer needed.

I’ve heard the expression before, as I’m sure you have, that “we are the future.” What does that mean? We don’t know. We’re not educated. We’re not growing up. Why don’t you tell us? Or better yet, stop thinking about us in the future and think about us in the present. We’re here. Do something before we have no future.

I didn’t like Thanksgiving much until I went to college. Now I enjoy coming back home and seeing my family and friends. I know how much I have to be thankful for. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten the chance to go to college? I’d probably still be living at home, going to Thanksgiving dinner but not understanding the real purpose of it, the reality of the holiday. The reason why it’s even important; the reason why it’s more than just hours of football and consuming mass quantities of turkey. I’m thankful that I understand it now; I’m thankful that I’m thankful.

I am thankful for the opportunities that have been given to me. I am not writing for myself. I’m writing for the student who’s just like me except that they can’t afford this any longer. The thing is, I couldn’t afford it either without federal government aid. But we need more than this – we need the state government to aid us too.

It’s Thanksgiving. Give someone a way to figure out the holiday. Give them something to be thankful for: a low-cost, high-quality education.

Thanks.
Katharine Van Amburg
UCSC

Some passing thoughts on the Berkeley and Santa Cruz occupations, from someone who was there briefly

It is no great secret that the terminal crisis of capitalism is before our eyes: the welfare state, the bitter product of two world wars, the child of Hitler and Noske, wherein a certain social safety net was provided for a measure of social peace, is in the process of being forcibly liquidated by the exigencies of an incresingly bankrupt social system. This much is evident to all those who have a basic thinking capacity. And thus, those who are protesting for a defense of this transient historical form will find nothing here of value, nor even anything here addressed to them. Such people can protest all day for a return to the glory days they imagine, but since these halcyon times never existed anyways, one can see they will certainly have no success now. Rather we address ourselves to those who believe in any fashion in the “terminus of student life”; but not of course to open something so worthless as a literary polemic or discussion, nor to presume to give prescriptions or orders — all we do here is attempt a “generalization of insinuation.” For, to be right means nothing, what is important is acting in consequence.

The movement has already become acquainted with its enemies: the unionist, student politician type being only the most insidious and veiled. In this we have had to re-learn one of the primary lessons of the Movement of 77: the actual complicity of all unions and parties, however radical sounding, with the cops. At Berkeley, this special type of policing seems far more prevalent than at Santa Cruz, along with the historical baggage of Savio and the Black Panthers weighing like a nightmare on this current generation, not to mention the tired front-group appeals to some sort of radicality concerning Obama, which is about as sad and deluded as one could get. Whereas at SC, these safety valves were less firmly in place, and the flimsy protection of last resort for American capitalism, that is to say the pathetic ideological detritus of Crimethinc, was more in evidence. At SC, the occupation of Kerr Hall marked a high point of initiative and offensive, as the protestors left their original building and took another. This perhaps shows the opportunities afforded by the “repressive tolerance” of the SC administration. Yet after a while even this was not enough — in truth, what was important was not so much the building taken, but the audacity of the participants. This energy was lost throughout the following time, as the occupation tried to sit still while the police sent informants and surveyed the area, readying a response. Meantime, a list of responsible, and because of that, totally boring and irrelevent demands were made. It must be said that these demands were far less reasonable than others that might be made, or even better, as happened previously, there could be a breaking with the logic of demands itself. For the demands, to our knowledge, were not fulfilled in any serious way, nor could they be by a terminally ill capitalism on life support — rather there was a recognition of force, and the peasant ferocity of the police quickly gave way to a leniency when a crowd was present (at all occupations, from what one can gather, but especially in the case of SC and Berkeley). Thus far, no one has deigned to say what is explosive, or perhaps implosive, in the US situation — the knavery of the police (smashing that girl’s hand, rubber bullets, numerous instances of wanton brutality, etc.) is rather the product of a deep fear among the US elite: their army is twice defeated, collapsing from a morale and logistical perspective; the country is essentially bankrupt; the inequality, notable even for the sociologists, continues to grow. These times are revolutionary, it must be said, even if the people are not yet.

What must change this is willfulness. At SC, certain proposals were insinuated as to the hosting of a love-in, or auto-reducing, to open lines of supplies and communications. An interruption of the “business operations of the University” is only the beginning; far more important is to elaborate new forms-of-life to replace the old world. Against this, one excuses onself from acting with the old Situationist shuffle step of not wanting to be an avant-garde. But if not us, who, and if not now, when are we to taste the delights of communism? We must be honest here: if a radical nucleus allows pitiful demands to be made, for fear of being too radical, then they only allow themselves to become pitiful. At the end of the SC occupation, a clever choice was made to withdraw from Kerr Hall without arrests. But this is also because there was nothing worth getting arrested for, let alone dying for. And to think of the splendor of Exarcheia, and how Alexandros was killed there, and the comrades there fight the cops, fascists and state-controlled armed struggle groups every day and face a biopolitical democracy that has revealed the Nazism in its heart — no, no, there has been far too much shallow triumphalism thus far from the unions and bureaucrats, pleased to have stirred out of their sickbed for a breif while; we must be honest, film screenings commemorating what has happened thus far must be discarded, true revolutionaries can not be satisfied with what has thus far transpired, even indulgently — as if, should we wait long enough without acting radical, revolutionary things will happen on their own. It is time we leave the beautiful soul of the post-1972 Situationism that does nothing but criticize behind, in order to direct and succour the unthinking consciousness that tries to act. Communism can not be talked about, it must be really lived. This is the historic task, at once simple and complicated, of this, the final moment of world-spirit. The prisoners of Plato’s cave must be led into the sunshine of the revolution, not bantered with in the darkness of capitalism.

Ergo, really living communism must be our objective. As the Kerr Hall protestors perhaps discovered when they were leaving the building, what mattered was not a building they took, certainly not the architectural concrete disaster of Kerr Hall, but what was in their hearts. A wall falling down means nothing, so long as we believe in communism, since it was never a country, or a party, but a way of relating to one another. One slogan appropriate to this revelation might be the title of the latest Tiqqun re-issue in France: Everything has failed, long live communism!

Concordantly, writing petty trash about saving and defending the university, or any other number of things, must be forgotten. Our first task must be to liberate all of our prisoners: poor Doug and so many others. And just as in the prior form of spirit, factory strikes became qualitatively more revolutionary when they posed political, international goals, so must we leave behind the sad demands of students pleading and whining for integration into a failed social system: we should rather aim to punish the wicked, to deliver a crushing riposte to the infamous scoundrels and their arrogant pretensions of this depraved time. Moreover, in Greece, the Conspiracy of the Nuclei of Fire are our prisoners too; these poor kids framed by an increasingly repressive state need to be liberated. There is another ridiculous new arrest in the Tarnac affair, coming on the heels of an intimidation arrest in Rouen, which only underlines the petty malice of the government that its frame up there has collapsed. And the 9 defendants are still prohibited from seeing one another! This is all too shameful: let us call for an unlimited human strike, since the revolutionary general strike of the working class is no longer the proper figure of spirit, respond to a 32% increase with rent strikes, mass expropriation, sabotage of classes, refusal of alienated social relations — here’s hoping we collapse the dollar and further aggravate the crisis!

This is where our movement must go in order not to be covered with infamy; at the hour when the Greeks and Austrians descend en masse on American embassies — to help us, to magnify our blows! — to allow others to pose these shit demands and to do nothing crazy with these buildings when we take them is simply ineptitude plastered over with good will. Why are not the clocks spirited away, masks given to all, monogamy annulled, electronics banned, counter-intelligence set up to ferret out spies, look outs placed around the building, sorties mounted to harass the enemy, food expropriated, and surreptitious withdrawals enacted to commence the party somewhere else? We know the Commune is not dead, it is wherever we are: “The hopes and expectations of the world up till now had pressed forward solely to this revelation, to behold what absolute Being is, and in it to find itself. The joy of beholding itself in absolute Being enters self-consciousness and seizes the whole world; for it is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure moments, which expresses just this: that only when absolute Being is beheld as an immediate self-consciousness is it known as Spirit.” This, one suspects, is precisely what exists in Tarnac, in Exarcheia, in millions of hearts the world over, and it is this that the dying old world hates so much. As for us, it is time to start really living what we believe.

In closing, the future of humanity will be communist, or not at all. This current movement can remain ignominiously tied to a collapsing system, its leaders, unions, daily routine, practices, and parties, or it can desert this sinking ship, and accomplish greater things than anyone can presently imagine. These are the ethical, profoundly metaphysical choices of the moment: “There is no longer a problem of the Head. There is only a problem of the body, of the act.”

So that perhaps some on the campuses will know at least one of the authors of this piece, and better understand their encounters, which may have confused them, owing to the caprices of this strange war of shadows in which we find ourselves engaged, and thus remembering may change prior opinions that were formed, this is signed,

M.

Post-script: “In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.”

by Eric Chase
Film and Digital Media Major, Junior, UCSC

On November 18th, 2009, at 3:49 PM, I was sent an e-mail that was meant to inform me that both entrances to UC Santa Cruz were blocked by protesters in solidarity against the 32% tuition fee raise.

That same day, I left my house, and my computer at 3:27 PM to go eat dinner and then go to class. It was for Creative Writing, and my poem was getting workshopped. I wouldn’t let a little protest stop me from getting there.

It wasn’t little.

As I stepped outside the front door, I heard a cacophony of noise coming from what I could only assume as the main entrance of campus. (I was lucky enough to live this close, really.) It was a little odd, I thought, but I would push through if I had to.

I started walking toward the sidewalk, but before I could take three steps, a city bus drove right past me on my tiny residential street, in some cosmic way to tell me, “All bets are off, kid.” That never happened. The 16 bus never went on this street. It was supposed to be on Bay Street, not on Nobel, right there.

Fine then, I thought. I pulled out my phone and called my friend Nathan to give me a ride, if he was willing. And he was. In a minute, he pulled up beside the curb in front of me. He lived conveniently close just down the street.

“I think we should go up Western to Empire Grade and go through the West Entrance,” he said as I slid into the car.

“I was just about to say that,” I replied.

He drove us a grand total of 200 feet before we were stuck in a glut of cars all going toward Empire Grade, the only road that led to the West Entrance.

“Crap,” I said, rolling down the window to look around. “Traffic must be getting detoured through here.”

“When’s your class?” He asked.

“Five.”

“Oh, okay, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Time well spent. Almost. It took 45 minutes to get a third of the way to the entrance, but we entertained ourselves by guessing what was around the next corner, watching the surplus pedestrians going up and down, and examining the cars surrounding us. All in all, it was fun, but it didn’t take much longer for me to worry.

In front of us, cars were turning around and giving up hope, and the line only seemed to move when they did. Not good.

It was time to abandon ship.

“Just let me out here and I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’s going to suck, but it won’t be getting any better just sitting here.”

“If you’re sure,” Nathan said, leaning to check if any cars ahead were moving.

I wished Nathan luck getting back home and got out of the car just beyond the arboretum, with about half a mile to go to the entrance and God-knows-how-much to the Crown classrooms.

(For those of you not fortunate enough to live in Santa Cruz, there’s a huge vertical climb from any given place on the southern half of the campus to anywhere on the northern half. There’s also only a theater and some housing on the southern half with a nice big farm separating the two.)

I climbed onward, passing car after car after truck, not bothering to make eye contact with anyone walking the opposite direction. It felt like some kind of walk of shame, like I was a weirdo who wanted to go to class on the day we were supposed to in solidarity against tuition increases.

I passed a tattered sign in the shadow of Oakes College on the side of the road that said “Slow: Children’s Play Area.” I laughed, especially since it was surrounded by sharp briar bushes. Gotta take care of the future generations.

Any kind of emotion other than anger drained from me once I found out what the e-mail failed to tell me. A throng of people, most with signs, kept the cars from entering through the awkward little West Entrance. There wasn’t any kind of clear chant, just a dull roar of conversation.

I was too tired to do anything, though. I wasn’t what most would call “in shape.” But sohelpmeGod, if anyone even said a word to me as I passed through that glut of people, I would snap. I was ready at a moment’s notice to give a tirade to any poor soul that bothered to stand in my way and lecture me. Fortunately, no one did, and I didn’t do anything I would later regret.

Just as I was finished getting through the group, I heard a few of them arguing.

“You’re actually thinking about letting them in?!” one said.

Yes, I thought, that’s a stupid idea, because after all, why would you want to let someone into campus to go to class? Clearly the way to show we’re upset about the tuition increases is to be apathetic and not go. I grumbled these kinds of thoughts until a campus bus appeared from a parking lot.

I sprinted toward the bus stop, which proved to be extremely difficult given the ascent I’d already made to get to the campus entrance. But if I could just make it to the bus stop, I could still have time to eat dinner…

He waited for me. I wish I asked him his name so I could mention it here, but I owe a lot to that bus driver. Thank you, whoever you are. I spent the trip from the West Entrance to Crown panting and breathing and overall just freaking out the people around me. It was still a pain to traverse Crown’s infamous Cardiac Hill, but it felt like a speed bump compared to the Everest of Empire Grade.

And I still ate dinner. I ate it faster than Speed Racer talks, but I managed to do it. And I still made it to class on time.

In that class, we talked about the protest, the unsettling feelings we had about the fee raises and the difficulty in getting around. I heard horror stories of people on buses getting thundered upon by rouge hands and fists. I sat and complained, but felt guilty that I wasn’t doing something. After all, I was in the same boat as those jerks who blocked the entrance, and I was still sympathetic to their problems.

And then we came up with an idea, something that molded and changed into what you’re reading now, the collection of stories and poems that show that we are students and we are people. That we all are affected by this increase.

As much as I hated the protesters blocking the West Entrance on that Wednesday, I still know that they just wanted to show how much they care about their education. I completely disagree with their methods, but they are doing something. And now, so am I.

I don’t want to imagine myself being an opposing force to the protesters, but I don’t want to count myself as one of them. Someone recently asked me to pardon their fatigue because they were “fighting for education last weekend.” Oh, how noble, when you put it like that. I spent Wednesday fighting to go to class. It doesn’t even sound like we were on opposite sides. And really, we aren’t.

It won’t be easy, finding a solution to the lack of funds, but punishing the very students who make up the universities by raising tuition isn’t the answer. For some, the impact is minimal, and they’ll receive a slightly larger check in the mail to pay for their schooling.

But where does that leave me? The son of a middle-class couple who saved up their money for their child’s college education? All of a sudden, that money is running out a lot faster than it should, and I might not be able to stay at the same school without taking a full-time job or nefarious loans. My mother told me that this is exactly what she wanted to avoid when I first started going to college, that she had to do it as a student and wanted me to focus only on my studies.

I know that each of those protesters who pissed me off, blocked the road, and knocked on the buses are in a similar situation. I can’t ignore that, and I can’t hate them for it. Not only that, but there are thousands of students who also disagree with the protesters’ methods but are in the same boat.

My name is Eric Chase. I am a Film and Digital Media Major at UC Santa Cruz. I have a family that saved money my entire life to pay for college. I like to get together with my friends on weekends and I have a terrible habit of procrastination, but still manage to get things done, on time and with good quality. I am a human being.

And I can’t afford to learn, just like ten thousand other students.

Group Invitation:  The UCSC protesters do NOT represent me.

Name:
The UCSC protestors do NOT represent me!

Category: 
Student Groups – Social Groups

Description: 
Yes, we’re against the 32% fee hikes but damaging buildings, graffiti, blockades, and unnecessary occupations are ANNOYING, RUDE, AND INCONVENIENT!

The UCSC protestors do not constitute a majority of the UCSC undergraduate population.

We’ve been referred to as the “Silent Majority.” We’re not into radical tactics and we have our own beliefs along with our own means of expressing it.

Join this group                 Ignore

 As your eyes scan the latest news–“Kerr hall protest ends; clean-up may take days”–screams erupt from beneath your window.

 “Fuck you, 32!” “Fight back!”  “Organize!”   

 You look outside and see your roommate heckled by a mob of cardboard sign-wielding occupiers as they march up the hill to occupy something else.  Their yells cut the silence with a knife and echo in aches through the heads of studying students.  Others wait at the bus stop for buses that won’t be coming, stopped at the gate by the not-so-peaceful protesters.  Bus drivers stop in the streets and refuse to go on.  You are late for class.  Hundreds of others cannot even enter campus.  Your professor is forced to cancel a lecture that many cannot attend, and you are stuck walking back, your work wasted.

What are we fighting for?
An education?  A price? 
What is the price of education?
What is the price of fighting for education?

Click. 
You receive a new Facebook invitation.
It’s called “The UCSC protesters do NOT represent me.”
You read through the details
Your mouse hovers over the “Join” button.

….stop.

Hold on a second.  There’s something missing here.

Think for a moment: what do the protesters represent, exactly? 

They represent… crisis.
They represent… panic.
They represent anger hiding behind calm faces.
They represent the misery of paying off a lifetime of debt.

They represent all that is irrational in a 32% fee increase.

Their methods may be irrational, but so is this: so is paying more for less.  So is paying for furloughs and lay-offs and impacted majors that you can’t get into and larger classes that no longer teach you so much as they talk at you.  So is funding the maintenance of the more prestigious schools that you don’t attend while your own school suffers.  So is paying to study at a research-based school whose research in unattainable because the library hours were cut. 

It makes no sense.

And so, we are angry.  And so, we gnash and writhe, and our anger swells and occupies buildings and blocks off roads and rips up electrical cords.  It trashes things and lashes out at a broken system that doesn’t pay for its profits that don’t profit us. 

It’s irrational.  But what is?  What part of this system doesn’t screw another part over?  Which side of the coin can be face up without putting another down?

The UCSC protesters do not represent me -
They represent a broken system. 
They represent a foundering economy.
They represent the sinking financial situation of most of America.

They represent the problem.

Now…

Who will represent the solution?

Signed sincerely,

Kaitlin Lindros

A Literature and Sociology Major
And Sophomore at UC Santa Cruz

by Kaitlin Lindros
Lit. & Soc. Major, Sophomore, UCSC

Stuck in the middle
Of an economic crisis
I have enough
But not enough
To avoid living my life in debt.

Because I’m well off
I get no aid
Because I’m not rich
My bills aren’t paid.

And so
I’m stuck in the middle -
A class all my own
A large class
Of floundering masses
That will soon sink
Down, down
Until
We’re all low
And you, the administration,
The men fishing for profit,
Will be left alone
Above
Casting empty nets
For fish
That no longer swim.

This poem describes the fate of the middle class after the fee increases. I belong to this middle class and face the dilemma of financing my college education. The only financial aid I receive is loans, loans that I will very likely be paying off for a very large portion of my life. I was ready to accept paying for the loans in exchange for a quality education. However, now the fee increases are making these loans even more expensive at the COST of my good education. They are simultaneously making me pay more while giving me less. They say that part of the fee increases will go towards helping the needy students pay for the fee increases – but what about me? Who will help ME pay for the fee increases?

I ask my readers, then, to consider a future in which the middle class of today will become lower class as more and more people like me go into debt. Consider a future when all that is left are the richest of the rich… and the rest of us: the poor. What will it take for the rich to provide us aid? Will they wait until we are ALL needy? Or will they try and find a way to fix this?

“If you’re scared today you’ll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you’ve got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren’t slaves we have to do it so we can do what they’re doing in all other schools to show that we’re the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can’t wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity. The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged; cascades of hidden meaning rush onto rigid notions of possession and our eyes look past surface appearances. So now when asked, “who does the university belong to?” we can’t fail to recognize that the college itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin. Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and the Regents but to also extend belonging past national and state borders and throughout time. It’s clear, the entire university, for that matter, every university belongs to everyone, employed and unemployed, all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours because it’s everyone’s and the destruction of the property relation, with all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the affirmation of this truth. It’s our university…

…but, as of now, in its present configuration, who would want something so disgusting as a school?

The Poverty of Student Life is the Poverty of Capitalist Society

It’s now larger than any conspiratorial plot by Thomas Huxley. In fact, he could have never envisioned the extent to which contemporary class society would transform education as such into another separated activity, detached from the totality of life and devoid of any practical worth or good, while, simultaneously, being in perfect accord with the needs of capitalist production.

Learning is now sapped of all its content, education is but another part of the assembly line in the social factory, and the university itself serves an important function within the reproduction of disjointed life in this divided society. While the collegiate apparatus infests countless minds with the logic and technical knowledge of capital, the illusion is being sold that somehow academic labor is divorced from the world of work. Our apologies, but a term paper is not the production of autonomous and creative knowledge, it is work and therefore exploitation. It is human activity animated for the sake of capital not for humanity itself. The conditioning and preparation of students for a life crushed by regimented value creation is the essential purpose of the college: to teach the young how to give and take orders. Nothing about the university is neutral; its role in society is clear. The lines are being drawn.

The Representation of the Student Body Has Become an Enemy of the Student Body

You will always be offered dialogue as if that were its own end; it will die in bureaucracy’s stale air, as if trapped in a soundless room. In insurrectionary times, action is the speech that can be heard.
-Slogan written on a Digital Wall

Far before last week’s events, we’ve located them in the enemy’s camp. Student activist-leaders shamed, begged, pleaded, and finally began to shriek and scream at us when we ignored their megaphone-amplified orders. In their last ditch effort to see their commands followed, they physically assisted the police in blocking us from occupying buildings and protected the outnumbered cops from our punches and shoves. It’s obvious they’ve chosen their side some time ago. These are the idiots who were telling people who tried to break down the door of California Hall on November 18th that they should not do so because “there was no consensus.” These are the same fools who sabotaged the attempted storming of the Regents meeting at UCLA and the occupation of Covel Hall, ruining months of self-directed planning, after declaring the crowd had become too “agitated.” The Cynthias, who later that day went on to disrupt the occupation of Carter-Huggins Hall. These are the same politicians, who grabbed the megaphone as students marched in to the President’s office in Downtown Oakland, prepared to raise utter hell and instead directed them into a dialogue with middle-level administrators, later issuing an order that the crowd must leave “peacefully.” Disgusting, yet typical. The only consensus they want is rallied around the social peace and the preservation of the existent institutions and the only alteration they want of the power structure is their ascent to the top of it. By actively collaborating with the administration and police, by orchestrating arrests, by frittering away the momentum of the angry, they validate the insults we flung at them and they revealed themselves for the “student cops,” “class traitors” and “snitches” they are.

For them it’s a knee-jerk reaction: challenge their power and they fall back on identity politics. If they don’t get their way they cry privilege. When the actions escalate, when we begin to feel our power, the self-appointed are waiting to remind us that there may be the undocumented present – the activist super-ego. Somehow in their tiny paternalistic brains they believe they know what’s best for immigrants implying that the undocumented are too stupid to understand the consequences of their actions and god granted the student leaders the wisdom to guide these lost souls. In their foolish heads, immigrants remain passive sheep, black people never confront the police and just enjoy the beatings they get, and the working class always takes orders from the boss.

In pseudo-progressive tongue they speak a state-like discourse of diversity; the groans of the student-activist zombie is the grammar of the dead revolutions of the past. Their vision of race politics ignores the triumphs and wallows in the failures of the 60’s movements. The stagnant ghosts of yesterday’s deadlocked struggle; they are the hated consequences of the civil rights era that produced a rainbow of tyranny with a Black president mutilating Afghanis, Asian cops brutalizing students on campus, and Latino prison guards chaining prisoners. In this same way, the opportunists act out their complicity with the structures of order. When students defy preset racial categories and unify in order to take action on their own behalf, the student cops attempt to reinforce the present day’s violent separations and reestablish governance. They fail to recognize that divisions among proletarians are questioned only within the struggle itself and the festering scissions between the exploited can only be sutured with hands steadied by combat with the exploiters. Like a scalpel used to reopen stitched wounds, the student activists’ brand of multi-culturalism is undoubtedly a tool of state repression.

During the scuffle with the police in front of California Hall on the inaugural day of the strike, one of the student cops asked, “What’s going to happen when we get into the building?” For us, given the social context of the strike, the answer is obvious, for them, even the question is problematic because of the risk it poses to their position of dominance. In the moment of rupture, their role as managers becomes void. Self-directed action crowds out the programmatic. They forever need to stand on the edge of the reality that something could pop off, because it is in that possibility that they can control the situation and ensure that things do, in fact, move in their way towards nowhere. When things get hot, the self-elected of the student movement are waiting with their trusty fire extinguishers ready in hand because they know that when people act on their own and valorize their self-interest, their authority crumbles and everyone can see how bankrupt their strategy of social containment actually is. The student activist stutter-steps on the path of nothingness. But we hope to turn the mob against them. To seize their megaphones and declare: “Death to Bureaucracy!” Some may ask, “Why have these hooligans come to our campus?” “They’ve come to ruin everything!” the student leaders will say.

And for once, we agree.

We Are Not Students, We Are Dynamite!

A movement results from combinations that even its own participants cannot control. And that its enemies cannot calculate. It evolves in ways that cannot be predicted, and even those who foresee it are taken by surprise.
-Paco Ignacio Taibo

Many will ask then, why have we thrown ourselves into the ‘student movement?’ We are not students, at least not now and never in the UC system. It is not feasible for us to attend the UC in the first place, either because of the cost or the lack of desire to live the rest of our lives ridden with overwhelming debt.

We have not come to the university to make demands of the Board of Regents or the university administration. Nor do we wish to participate in some form of ‘democracy’ where the ‘student movement’ decides (or is told to do so by student leaders) how to negotiate with the power structure. For us, Sacramento and its budget referendums are as useless as the empty words spewing from the mouths of the union leaders and activists on campus. Nothing about the “democratizing” the school system or forcing it to become better managed or more “transparent” even mildly entices us. No, we didn’t join the student movement to obtain any of these paltry demands.

Last week, we began to attack the university not just because we are proletarians scorned by and excluded from the UC, or that we hope by resisting we may reduce costs and thus join the UC system and elevate our class positions. Our choice to collaborate in the assault on California’s school was driven solely by our own selfish class interest: to take its shit and use it for ourselves. Occupied buildings become spaces from which to further strike the exploiters of this world and, at the same time, disrupt and suppress the ability of the college to function.

Like any other institution structured by class society, the university is one of our targets. We made our presence in the student movement to break down the divisions between students angry over fee hikes, workers striking against lay offs, and faculty at odds with the administration over cuts and furloughs. These are not separate struggles over different issues, but sections of a class that have a clear and unified enemy. We have come for the same reason we intervene in any tension: to push for the total destruction of capitalist exploitation and for the re-composition of the proletariat towards communism.

And so, ask yourself how could one even go about reforming something as debilitating as a university? Demanding its democratization would only mean a reconfiguration of horror. To ask for transparency is nothing but a request for a front row seat to watch an atrocity exhibition. Even the seemingly reasonable appeal for reducing the cost of tuition will leave the noose of debt wrapped snuggly around our necks. There’s nothing the university can give anyone, but last week’s accomplishments show that there is everything for us to take. If anything, our actions, as a means in themselves, were more important than any of the crumbs the UC system or the Regents Board might wipe off the table for us. During these days, we felt the need for obliterating renewal give rise to intense enthusiasm. We felt the spirit irradiate throughout campus and press everyone “to push the university struggle [not only] to its limits,” but to its ultimate conclusion: against the university itself.

…And So It Must Spread

“It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form.”

-The Phenomenology of Spirit

The stench that the university emits has become unbearable and students everywhere are reacting against the institution that has perpetually rotted away their being via an arsenal of disciplinary techniques. At campuses across California the corrosion of life is brought to a quick halt when the college’s daily mechanism of power is given the Luddite treatment, and suddenly, studying becomes quite meaningless. Shamefully, the administration, terrified they are losing control and supervision of the pupils they spent so much time training, turn riot police on anyone ripping off their chains. At UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, SF State and CSU Fresno the unlimited occupations display the universal need for free and liberated space. The recalcitrance is spreading. In Austria, students left their occupied territory at the Fine Arts Academy to march on the US embassy in solidarity with the police repression on California campuses. On the same continent, the occupations in Greece have now extended outside the universities into the high schools and even the middle schools. Everywhere, the youth are recognizing the school as a vapid dungeon stunting their growth and, at the same time, they are refusing submission to the crushing of their bodily order. All over, a new generation is seeking the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.

The assaults on police officers, the confrontations with the administration, the refusal of lectures, and the squatted buildings point the objective struggle in the direction of the complete and total negation of the university. That is, brick by brick smashing the academic monolith into pieces and abolishing the college as a specialized institution restricted to a specific segment of society. This will require the instillation of technique known as learning to be wholly subverted and recomposing education as a generalized and practical activity of the entire population; an undermining through which the student shall auto-destruct.

Going halfway always spells defeat, and so, the spreading of movement is our only assurance against this stagnation. Complete self-abolition necessitates that the logic of revolt spill out of the universities and flood the entire social terrain. But the weapons of normalcy are concealed everywhere and especially within the most mundane characteristics of daily life. The allegiance to the bourgeois family structure and interruptions by holiday vacations and school breaks threaten to douse the fuse before its ignition and hinder our momentum.

Let us not lose sight of the tasks before us.

We must forcefully eject the police from the campus. Find their holes and burn them out. Block their movements near occupied spaces. Build barricades; protect that which has been re-taken. We need only to look to Chile or Greece to see the immense advantage movements possess once they seize territory and declare it free of police. Blockade the entrances and gates of the campus as the students have already begun to experiment with at UC Santa Cruz.

We must also denounce and destroy the student Left (the recuperative, the parasitic, the “representative”) that seeks to de-escalate the movement and integrate it back into politics. Our venom is not only directed at those who assisted the police in blocking angry students from entering California Hall at UC Berkeley or obstructed the crowds during the Regents meeting at UCLA but also of those who sought to negotiate with the police “on behalf” of the occupiers of Wheeler Hall. It is telling that the police will negotiate with them, because to the cops, they are reasonable. We are not, however, because we seek the immediate annihilation of both the pigs and the activists.

Renew the strikes and extend their reach. Occupy the student stores and loot them. Sell off the computers in the lab to raise funds. Set up social spaces for students and non-students alike to come in and use freely. Appropriate the copy machines and make news of the revolt. Takeover the cafeterias and bars and begin preparing the communal feast. Burn the debt records and the construction plans. Chisel away the statues and vandalize the pictures of the old order. In short, create not an ‘alternative’ that can easily make its fit within the existent, but rather a commune in which power is built to destroy capitalist society. When faced with a university building, the choices are limited; either convert it to ashes or begin the immediate materialization of the international soviet.

To all waged and unwaged workers – students or not, unemployed, precarious or criminal we call on you to join this struggle. The universities can become not only our playgrounds but also the foundations from which we can build a partisan war machine fit for the battle to retrieve our stolen lives.

And to the majority of the students, from those paying their way to those swimming in debt, all used as collateral by the Regents, who bravely occupied buildings across California and fought the police against the barricades – we say this clearly: we are with you! We stood by you as you faced down the police in the storming rain and defended the occupiers. Your actions are an inspiration to us all and we hope to meet you again on the front lines. In you we see the spirit of insurgent students everywhere.

As our Austrian friends recently told us, “Take out your hairspray and your lighter”! Tear down the education factory. Attack the Left and everything that it “represents.” Attack the new bosses before they become the old ones. Life serves the risk taker – and we’re rolling the fucking dice!

FOR ANARCHY AND COMMUNISM!

-Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

Today I went through the 214 unread emails that had stacked up in my ucsc.edu account, which included the ongoing dialogue between the students and the administration. Basically the administration has lost sight of the goal of education now that money’s tight (why are they charging ahead with expansion construction? That’s a different fund? Oh well then that makes sense.), and too many students are using this as an excuse for self-righteous vandalism…do you think the UC Regents are going to have to clean up all the shit you broke? I decided to express my frustration in limerick form.

There once was a gold university,

With goals of growth and diversity,

But the budget got cut,

Students punched in the gut,

While hippies revel in pointless perversity.

Personally, I loathe the UC Regents with a fiery passion; in all likelihood this will not be my last injustice-themed limerick inspired by them. HOWEVER, protest effectively! I find it impossible to defend these kinds of tactics: destroying Kerr hall just means diverting funds to clean-up, more work for the already stretched maintenance staff, and antagonizing the people you intend to negotiate with. jeez.

To the Powers That Be:

The state of higher education in California is a travesty.  I have no choice but to speak out against the actions that have been taken to undermine my generation.  As Mario Savio stated so eloquently in 1964 when he was speaking at Sprow Hall during the Free Speech movement:

There comes 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 all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Generations of students have gone through the UC system since then.  Isn’t it interesting that we now find ourselves at a similar crossroads, where the students demand to be listened to but are dismissed because of their radical views concerning equality?  And isn’t it interesting that the gaze has not been turned to those who have caused such inequality, to those who truly are radical in their persistent devalorization of our education? 

This is the legacy that you have all helped create: the legacy of the machine; the legacy of the elite indiscriminately using the masses to maintain its own wealth.  To this I ask: Did you honestly think that the issue of the ideological Baby Boomers would sit idly by as the Regents tried to maintain their assets by devastating ours? Could anyone have been as disillusioned as to think that we would go without a fight?

My generation has inherited a vast array of mistakes: a devastating state budget deficit, a nationwide economic recession, and a worldwide national reputation of ignorance.  I would mention the physical damage that we have caused our environment, but that is a different letter.  We are overwhelmed by the job ahead of us.  We are overwhelmed as to how to clean up the mess that you all have created for us.  And we are more overwhelmed by the fact that in 2009, less than 20% of college students attempting to find jobs actually got one, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.  It appears that our future is as grim as the present.

The Regents’ approval of a 32% increase in tuition was an attempt to compensate for the lack of state funding of the UCs. The money has to come from somewhere, right? 

But rather than coming up with solutions, you have taken the path of the coward, trying to save your own hides.  But you have overlooked details that you yourselves have created.  You have overlooked my generation.  We are the product of these Universities of California, and we will not go gently into that good night.  For the machine can break—a detail that has been overlooked.  The machine breaks if no one maintains it.

By increasing tuition, the Regents are decreasing the number of educated people in our society, foreshadowing their own downfall.  If younger generations cannot afford to be educated, there will be few to perpetuate the machine, and many who will see to its demise.  But you knew all this, right?  The Powers That Be knew this was coming.  They knew that by increasing tuition, essentially privatizing education, they were supporting the creation of a more stratified society, separating the masses by those who could and could not afford to be educated.  And they knew that by limiting the numbers of those educated, they would send our society into a downward economic spiral, as if our economy could be dug any deeper into the hole it has hollowed out for itself now.  This was all foreseen, this came as no surprise, but a truth has been left out of the picture…one that affects even you. 

When all is said and done, who will take care of you when your money does not suffice?  When this generation takes over your jobs and the responsibility of your own geriatric welfare, will you sleep soundly at night?  Will you accept that we have no funds to take care of you?  You may think that that will never happen to you, but the mighty will fall to the karmic retribution of life. You will return to a state of infancy, unable to take care of yourselves, and no one will be there, because you have taught us to prioritize—and you will not be a priority.  A sad and grim truth, yet a product of your own doing, don’t you think?

We deserve answers.  We deserve respect, and we deserve to be a part of the solution.  Let us have a say, and we will find a way to work it out. A collaboration is needed; if you cannot see that, then the present and future is doomed.  It is as simple as that. Because if you are not willing to pay for your mistakes, then neither are we, and if the machine breaks, where will that leave you? 

Sincerely,

Leah Henderson
UC Santa Cruz

by Catherine Wong, UCSC

Can you afford this?
No.
How about you?
No.
And you?
No.
You?
No.
Y-
NO
Got it?

Our fees are increasing
Our numbers decreasing
Did you get your paycheck?
Mine read “zero” dollars
My bank account
can’t stop crying

I can’t pay for nothing
We got no library
We got no TAs
We got no teachers

“What do you got?” you ask
We got a 32% increase in fees
We got kids dropping out
We got angry protesters
We got a thirst
for education
that the Regents do nothing about

What’s the point
of going to school?
Joining a gang sounds fun
Might be more education too.

To the brave and daring protestors at UCSC:

First, I greatly admire your courage to band together and protest this outrageous fees increase along with other miscellaneous wrongs that happen to us. It is important to let the world know what’s going on here at the University of California.

However, I feel that you may be going overboard when you destroy our school property in the name of higher education. School property isn’t our enemy. It is here to serve us, not fight against us. Please let it be. Let us reserve our precious energy to resist our real enemy!

Go Slugs!! The battle isn’t over yet! There’s still a million miles to go! Are you all with me?! Let us unite and continue forward, strong and steady!

With love and sincerity,

Your fellow slug,

Julia.

(Julia Tran)

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Occupied UC Berkeley, 18 November 2009

Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.
UC President Mark Yudof

Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.
Karl Marx

Politics is death that lives a human life.
Achille Mbembe

Yes, very much a cemetery.  Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt.  The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.

Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death?  What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss?

And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear.  Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento.  He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement.  When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money.  He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process.  He manages our social death.  He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us.

He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is, meaning is ripped from action.  Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the administration here, only its own extension.

Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourse—it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless.  So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far?  This accumulation is our shared history.  This accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life.  A dead but restless and desirous life.

The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning.  As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death.  Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity.  A  ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property).  Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands.

Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’

But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place.  With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context.  As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential.  And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter.  The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities.  A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism.  And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls.

There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth.  The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded—the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations.  This is our gothic—we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless.

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.  Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard?

In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination.  We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else.  Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else.  We have measured ourselves and we have measured others.  It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their capital as a businessman.  It should feel good, gratifying, completing.  It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination.  After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.

We are convinced, owned, broken.  We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education!

When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant.  We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values.  What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own.

The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general.  They sell the practice through the image.  We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice.

In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation.  Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.

Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts.  Each bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death.

Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning.  It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact.  It’s the particular nature of being owned.

Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned.

A social movement is a function of war.  War contains the ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material.  When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.

It is November 2009.  For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies.  We need, we desire occupations.  We are an antagonistic dead.

Talk to your friends, take over rooms, take over as many of these dead buildings. We will find one another.

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.  –Giorgio Agamben

As UC Berkeley Investigates Police Brutality Against Students Protesting Fee Hikes, a Report From Inside the Takeover of Wheeler Hall.

More and more the actions on the UC campuses make me really want to attend UCSC, but at the same time think about waiting until next year.

Students from all UC’s (UCI, UCSD, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCD, UCSB, UCSC, UC Merced, UCR) gather to address the fee hikes induced to widen the education gap between the privileged and less so.
UC Regents Pass 32% Fee Increase on Students, Sparks Outrage

Daily Nexus
November 19, 2009

UCLA

UC Berkeley

                                                      by Andrew Azimian, UCSC

One

Fee Hike?
Who cares if the next generation
can’t get no education!

We’ll be an army-
of unskilled laborers,
waiting patiently outside Home Depot.

The pay is low, the work, long and arduous,
but we’ll make it, by an’ by.

I hope.

Two

Oh, excuse me, did you need that?
I was just about to pick it up for myself
                 Take this twenty on the floor.
I can see that you could really use it though.
With your ragged old tatters and
cheap gray shirt.

I’m sure you haven’t eaten.
Maid Maria cooked a wonderful dish tonight

You don’t mind if I take that,
Do you?

Three

“Education is the key!”
“Go to college,” they always say.

-But it’s too ’spensive!
I wish to God it was the Old Days!

You know, the Golden Years,
Times when the value of a buck
meant something more
than a cheap toy from the store.

“Get good grades & get to college!”
It’s the American Way.
Succeed at what you do &
pull yourself UP by those boot straps, boy!

Well let me tell you something.
There won’t even be bootstraps
left to pull, soon enough.
Just tattered, secondhand Pay-less sneakers.

Four

That Raise
I know you need That Raise, Sir.
But please, before you count your dollars.

Please, think of the children.
That imaginary and funny group that is
the future of this Country.

The only problem is, we grew up.
And now we want our chickens too.
We aren’t the invisible children who don’t know any better.

We’re real. Real citizens, voters, and students,
who want to get on with our lives:
                   So please, don’t make it impossible for us.
And all that crap. Again and again and again
again and again and again and again and again
until you listen.

bi-lingual!

for all i know, this could be my last evening as a san francisco occupant. my job is over, my friends have left (if only for thanksgiving break) and i am running out of time before i return to school. some reflections on the city; after deciding to forgo my first semester at UCSC in exchange for a full-time nanny-ing gig, you could say that i am whole-heartedly in love with homeless people, people on drugs, gay men, bay windows and multitudes of handle bar mustaches. i mean, where else in california can you cat call 26 year old men from your bedroom window at 1 am and continue to make different animal sounds until 2?

i speak from experience, last night my roommate becca and i, being the only ones left found ourselves incredibly bored and therefore harassed every human to have the misfortune to walk past our window. around 1 we got lucky, a young man (michael) who is plagued with a terrible case with ADHD (his mom is proud of him nonetheless) and whose symptoms mimicked those of a person on meth, fell into our trap and animal called late into the evening, my proudest was the monkey, becca’s the cow, michael’s the frog. eventually we coaxed him closer until he was standing beneath our window. we fed him lies to the wee hours, i am on house arrest for moving a brick of heroin, becca and i are twins from canada, our parents said they would disown us unless we were married by 25 and becca had recently been cheated on by her huge boyfriend. the night quickly came to an end when michael began to lay down beats.

what a night.

AN OCCUPATION IS A VORTEX, NOT A PROTEST

via This is Our Emergency

on the end of the kerr hall occupation: from the occupants and the admin

* * *
A little less conversation, a little more action…

EVERY TIME a building has been occupied at UCSC, the administration has responded by moaning publicly (and into every @ucsc.edu mailbox) about the monetary costs of alleged damages, as if by beating this drum to insist we focus only on what is important to them – property – rather than the present and future of our lives or any other issues that are at stake here. We’ll admit it, we felt a cruel pleasure as the cables screamed and cried when they were parted from the conference room tables; the tables begged for mercy as we broke their legs, jumping up and down on them with malicious glee; and we could only chortle as the filing cabinets complained loudly that we had not had a 4-hour long democratic process before strapping them across doorways. We imagine that the same bureaucrats who normally use the building, and who piously denounce our acts of collective negation must feel a similar thrill as they ransack our futures.

Seriously, they should be glad we didn’t burn the fucker down.

For around 60 hours we seized control of the driver’s seat of UCSC, the main economic power and site of social reproduction in the local metropole. In the aftermath, heading towards another seven-day unit of capitalist commodity-time, we feel the deadening of our existence especially sharply in contrast to the fullness of hours spent behind barricades, fighting for our right to our own destinies. It’s clear that the momentum we are part of has grown by leaps and bounds and as the crisis ramifies, we are forming new bonds and new complicities. Young people confronting an absent future are finding each other, recognizing ourselves in others as far away as Greece and Vienna, as near as the streets of LA. We are getting a taste of the power we want and it feels amazing.

There are a number of aspects of the Kerr Hall event that we as participants would like to illuminate.

AN OCCUPATION IS A VORTEX, NOT A PROTEST. People will go on and on about their ideologies and what “we should do”, but consciousness is determined by one’s experiences, one’s material conditions. Most people have never experienced much besides the life of a docile subject within capital, endless spectacular reiterations of commodification. It was rarely talking that changed anything, but rather the moments we gave in to the seduction of the vortex of collective power and desubjectivization – the vortex which leads towards anarchy and communization. Politics as such can only be a barricade against this process. A number of things have happened in the past few days which would have been almost too ridiculous to expect, almost right up til the moment they happened (see below), and a number of individuals underwent transformations in terms of their consciousness, their orientation to struggle and their relations to others. The most potent moments were those of collective illegality and subversion, the becoming-powerful of a we that defies precise naming.

First, the storming of Kerr Hall on Thursday. The taking of administration buildings had been raised before and dismissed as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic. It was, for the small groups of people who planned and carried out the GSC and Humanities occupations. But those bold actions got the ball rolling in a way that began to have clear ramifications by the Science Library soft occupation and by the actions being carried out by comrades on campuses elsewhere. The storming of Kerr became possible because of the occupation of Kresge Town Hall in order to hold a general assembly – organizers had been charged $400 to hold one there previously. The logic of occupation became very clear to people in the sense that the school wanted to rip us off over having a place to talk about the fact that they’re ripping us off. And it turned out that most of the people in that room were down to occupy an administration building, immediately, so in a great raw burst of species-being, we did.

Second, that on Saturday night the occupation democratically decided to escalate the barricade tactic in response to the deceptive, manipulative, bad faith farce that the administration tried to pass off as a negotiation process. This came after a day in which the pacifist-liberal faction had been threatening to dominate utterly, through rambling, circular meetings about how “barricades will prevent the administration from negotiating with us” (even when the agenda item was the upcoming negotiation meetings) and so on; it came at the end of a long, bitter, stressful, and contentious evening meeting of about 150 occupiers falling in a spectrum ranging from almost evenly-matched liberal to radical camps, that most of us on the “ultra-left” had gone into expecting that the majority would want to either remove the barricades entirely, or send us off to barricade another floor. When the decision was (narrowly) made to make the space as tactically secure as possible, we were all a bit shocked: the democratic faction dissolved itself out of the occupation via its very insistence on democracy. (Reminds one a bit of the line about capitalists selling you the rope to hang them with.) There was an immediate and intense change of energy, much like the surge we’d felt on Thursday (or on Friday when the door to the Chancellor’s wing was taken down). All of a sudden, we were bumping Justice, we were dancing on tables, we were pulling on masks, pushing the heaviest pieces of furniture we could find to new homes chanting “This means war!” People who minutes earlier had been telling us that building more barricades was a violent and foolhardy act and they would leave if we did so suddenly felt that surge of collective power and realized they wanted it, and they stayed. And some of them started helping us move tables and thanked us for sticking to our guns.

Third, that at 6am there were around a hundred people outside the building who faced off with a huge force of riot police armed with chemical weapons, and stood their ground with linked arms. It was incredibly moving to see our friends and people we didn’t know on the other side of a plate glass window being steadily driven back underneath a hail of baton blows they were taking for our sake. There were faculty, parents and staff in the crowd as well (a professor was hospitalized).

Fourth, what happened when the fire department ripped off the doors and cut the barricades. The cops asked us to come outside to be arrested one at a time and we refused. They then offered us a written guarantee that if we left the building voluntarily through a side door within ten minutes, we wouldn’t be IDed, detained, or arrested. Instantly all the anti-barricade arguments were shown to have been completely meritless. We all realized more or less instantaneously that we had won as much as we were going to win and that there was no point in symbolic, sacrificial arrests. Again: the cops asked us to walk outside and let them arrest us, and when we said “no,” they just fucking let us go. This is in many ways a testament to the fact that the occupation enjoyed widespread support from faculty, staff, unions, students, community members and even some of the administrators. It completely blew our minds. We had all been sure that we were going to jail, and all of a sudden we were outside with our friends and allies, everyone hugging, crying and cheering, stunned, chanting “We’ll be back!” as we marched off to Kresge.

Fifth, another aspiration articulated earlier and dismissed as a pipe dream – the obtaining a permanent organizing space – has also been realized. The occupation of Kresge Town Hall nearly collapsed as the focus of energy moved to Kerr, but the Kresge provost is so supportive of the movement that he has offered to waive all fees for use of the space for General Assemblies or related activities.

* * *

NOTES ON BARRICADE ARCHITECTURE for the benefit of other aspiring radical interior decorators. Kerr Hall was an extremely difficult place to thoroughly lock down due to the great number of possible entry points; hence the occupation of only one floor. Most of the doors were secured using the “bold new method” as described in the imaginary committee’s occupation guide. This method was battle-tested for the first time at UCLA and UCB in the past few days. At Kerr’s north entrance, the barricade was effective enough to require the fire department to actually rip the doors off of the building. At the front, the barricade gear had not been set properly and it proved embarrassingly easy for them to pry open a door with a bar and cut the strap. This was because the push bars were secured by only one clamp each, and at least one of these was too close to the hinge (thus allowing give at the other side). Really these kinds of doors should have two clamps each, toward the opening side of the door. Everything needs to be cranked down as tight as possible.. And more to the point, those who have knowledge on these matters should be double-checking each other’s handiwork. We all need to become architects. If they had not been able to open that door so easily, they would have been put in the position of having to smash windows to get in. We might still be in there now; who knows. Also, we would like to re-emphasize the idea of using the burliest clamps and tie-downs available, and webbing to keep clamps in place frictively on pushbars. Some pushbars are flimsy and break under too much pressure. We re-affirm the importance of permeable doors and outside support, when possible.

* * *

OCCUPY THE CRISIS. Some criticism has been leveled from anarchist circles that the emerging student movement is a reformist movement, or that contrasted the statements issued from Kerr Hall with those from the GSC and Humanities. It’s true, there was a different rhetoric, a quite different tone, pace, and constituency of the events. There were way more people involved this time, a lot of them were liberals who occasionally went on awful power trips, and a lot of them were either tremendously radicalized by this or forced to clarify their narrow and normative positions. We only learn by doing.

We recognize that this struggle has limits. It’s true. This struggle is nothing on its own. So is any struggle, hence, the point of transcendence, the “swerve”. The concept of an “imaginary party”: there is no vanguard or formal organization at the helm; we are connected because it is evident that we are (as proletarianized and precarious). Actions do not ramify simply because of courteously patronizing attempts at “outreach” and bureaucratic coalition-building, but because they have consequences. TPTG, a group of Greek anti-state communists with whom some of us are in touch, observed in response to our early communiqués and the GSC occupation that demandlessnesss is usually not a starting point of struggles, but a point of transcendence that occurs when they reach critical and concrete frustration. When Bangladeshi garment workers who will never see their back wages riot and loot, they are entering the vortex. When French workers threaten to blow up the bankrupt Fabris factory, it’s not because there is an easier way out of it for the boss. It’s because the society of capital is in crisis. When young people, docile-capitalist-worker-subjects-in-training, confront the negation of their future via massive tuition hikes, whether in California, Greece, Austria, or Mexico, it’s not because that is a “single issue” that would be “good enough” to fight on its own, but because people begin where they are.

We have begun. Connections have formed between agitators across the state and the increasingly pissed off students, workers and student-workers who make up the educational system. We are not occupying anything as a protest, as a means to simply meet demands: we know now that they are also spaces to experiment with new forms of social relations and self-organization that could lead us beyond the utterly impoverished future on offer within this decaying social order. We also are increasingly confronting the fact that there is no point in demanding anything anyway; those who rule us cannot give us what we want; we have found it instead in each other. We are forming relationships and something like a force, something born out of many, many people’s resentment of the cheats and failures of everyday life in capitalism; born just as much from our experiences of the vortex of becoming powerful together, of sharing of our difficulties and of our needs. The result is a diffuse force which may continue to become more so as the crisis deepens. Remarkably few among us know the story of Mai 68 and how student struggles in a period of economic decline ramified into the greatest general strike in history, but we know it. And all of us are learning how to organize and struggle together, which is the only education worth fucking having, anyway.

Never be alone again…

* * *

more fine pictures from the occupation here

see here for further discussion of the communique from an absent future and the emerging position of students and their movements in the current crisis (and coming insurrection?)

there is a general assembly tomorrow night 8pm at kresge town hall

Via Indybay

This is a portion of a slam poem I wrote at the end of the last school year and finished at the beginning of this school year. It discusses the frustration with the education system as well as certain students who are not taking advantage of the education they are paying for. Regardless if the education system is flawed, we are still paying for it and should use all resources available to us. If you go to class, BE THERE, BE FULLY PRESENT WITH YOUR  WHOLE SELF as much as you can. Otherwise, what are you paying for? Why are you here?

by Brooke, blvelasq@ucsc.edu

But you see,
I ain’t got decent sleep in days
It’s been one of those years that tear and tear
Until everything is torn and worn
Like Katrina blasting through-
Destroying everything in her path to spite the unbelievers of global warming
and the ones who’ve misused and abused our Mother-
It’s time for something new
I need to get a fresh view
Get wafts of some clean ocean air
Gaze at stars and stare at clouds
Instead of sitting listening to the same old same old
broken br brrrooken broooken broken broken
record
Repeating something over and over doesn’t improve it
You just end up looking like a parasitical parrot
Simply a puppet playing someone else’s game
No one wins and no one loses
this time around
‘Cause we are all affected
and there are no more prizes to be handed out
in this cyclical circus
because Start and Finish are the same space on the board

And What Are We Paying For?
If class is such a bore
and we would rather snore
and snort and smoke
than listen and learn
What are we paying for?
Yeah- let’s all just
Go to class sit back and relax
myspace it up
facebook slump
text n chat
pick up the slack
and to the Bitch sitting in the row in front:
I don’t want to see you and your slutty drunk friends on Facebook
or you designing some new sneakers on cyberspace
like you got the time and money to blow
‘Cause Daddy’s probably paying tuition and gas for your Mercedes Benz
Please do that shit somewhere other than class
‘Cause
SOME of us our selling our souls to the man
Just to get a chance to take a stand
To make a change
in this patriarchal rich white man’s land

But I WILL give you credit for giving me something to Slam
‘Cause you got me thinking-
What the Hell Are We Paying For?
Some of us are here to learn
It is our turn
to make something of this situation
Why do you think we are at this state funded institution?
This is our nation,
We got to take our station and man our own battle ships!
Our generation has inherited a sick, defected, infected Earth
She is fading fast
Disappearing among smog and smoke
And when did Nature become a side-show attraction?
Something to see on vacation
like a sick twisted circus…