Silenced passion

— Rollie Atkinson
Student protests and their young voices of raw passion,
rebellious cries and demands for justice have always been an
indispensable element of our democracy and free society.
Now, again, we see students taking to the streets, marching
across college campuses, up the steps of the state capitol and
rushing the police barracades.
What is the cause this time? Protests against social injustice?
A sit-in for free speech? Something so supreme as war and
peace?
No, this time the students’ protests and demands have been
reduced to a most basic complaint — they want their schools to stay
open.
This time the students are being joined by their teachers,
workers and some administrators. They are marching to save classes,
jobs, lower tuition fees and more state budget funding for
education.
Rallies are being held today all across California and here in
Sonoma County as part of a “March Forth on March Fourth” series of
demonstrations. The protests are being timed just before local
school districts must announce intendend teacher job cuts on March
15 and prior to the State Legislature’s hearings on budget
revisions next month.
Already this week students have been arrested at the capitol in
Sacramento and the Berkeley campus again erupted with a noisy and
violent clash.
This time there is no distant moral outrage or cultural reforms
behind the protests. There is no “social movement,” per se. This
time it’s about pocketbooks, tuition fees, teachers’ jobs and
classroom funding.
State funding for K-12 education was cut $6 billion last year
and more cuts are being threatened this year by Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger. UC and Cal State funding was cut by 20 percent last
year and student fees were raised by 32 percent.
Local high school students and their parents are unsure if they
can afford to enroll in college next year. Student grant programs
have been cut, admission numbers have been greatly reduced and many
class offerings have been eliminated.
Instead of UC Berkely students gathering at the Sproul Plaza and
Sather Gate to join Mario Savo in defense of student Free Speech as
they did in the 1960’s, students this week will be marching to
preserve English 101 sections.
Some campuses are planning “teach-ins” this week. These will not
be like the Earth Day teach-ins of the 1970’s that helped create
today’s Environmental Movement. This week’s sessions are aimed at
keeping campus libraries open.
Students must line up and register early for the shrinking
number of UC and Cal State admissions. This would not be a good
summer to join a bus load of Freedom Riders and join a Civil Rights
march. There would not be very many college students joining Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. to march across the South as they did in
the 1960’s when some gave their lives in violent
confrontations.
There are two unpopular wars being fought in Iraq and
Afghanistan and young U.S. men and women soldiers are dying every
day. But back on campus, there is no time to organize anti-war
“sit-ins” like those that helped bring the Vietnam War to an end in
1975.
If California farmworkers still needed support against unfair
labor practices, today’s students would be too preoccupied to
organize a grape boycott or march with Cesar Chavez and his United
Farmworkers.
But these social injustices of equal rights, fair labor laws,
environmental protection and others like South African apartheid
already have been answered.
Perhaps the young voices of students and their healthy instinct
for social outrage is no longer needed.
Sure, and perhaps we have found a perfect democracy where we no
longer need so many well-educated students, diverse student bodies
and so much liberal arts, academic quests and all other forms of
higher education.
Why not tell ourselves these untruths as we continue to
eliminate college opportunities for so many and silence the
informed passion of our youth?