Protesting

I have been thinking about the Occupy Oakland protest. I understand the frustations that drive people in the cold and rain to occcupy the Plaza in Oakland but I am a little confused about the the expectations of the participants and what I should or could do myself.

I was born in Berkeley in 1929, went to Berkeley High class of 1947, and have lived in Berkeley nearly all my life. I learned about protests late in life, when they came to my backyard with the Free Speech Movement. Before that I had thought we had free speech but I was far better acquainted with Betty Crocker and Dr. Spock (when he just stuck to advising mothers) than I was with the bill of rights or the constitution. It is hard to believe now but neither UC professor nor student had the right to say what they think. So watching Mario Salvio stand on top of the police car and listening to those words "Let's Take the Park" was a wake-up call. The students were right.

I wasn't exactly prepared for the Vietnam protests but I knew where Vietnam was and I knew we were fighting a war we could never win (if anyone ever wins wars at all). While the protests were growing, American soldiers and Vietnamese people were sinking into the mud, being hit with bullets and agent orange, and dying. The protests came and so did the soldiers and the National Guard. Berkeley was occupied. One memory that stays with me is the the night I took my two little girls to their piano recital promising them if they did well we could go out for ice cream afterwords. Good idea, except we couldn't get out. We were blocked at every intersection. The helicopters roared, the guards shouted and others like us, honked our car horns. The girls cried when I suggested we not might get ice cream that night. Of course at last the protester went another way and we could move again. This happened just a few days before my son was tear gassed at his middle school. The same school where one boy, mistaken for a protester, was shot. As maddening as this was, it only gave me a tiny glimps of what it might be like in another country, and also what protesting truly was about.

So I went to a real protest. Actually by mistake. I was told it was a Mother's Day celebration in Golden Gate Park. It was, but the mothers' protested. We all marched and I shouted "L.B.J. how many boys have you killed today" right along with the rest of them. Now I think protesting is a way of communicating with people who won't hear what you have to say. It's a way to make them listen. Perhaps because they were raised in Berkeley most of my children by now have protested for one cause or another and it is my granddaughter who sleeps in Ogawa Plaza. I have a hard time explaining to her why I am not there.

What I have learned from the protests of my life is one fact: If there is any question in your mind or even if there is not, go with the young people! They have the most to lose and history seems to prove them right most of the time. The young people are tasked with cleaning up the mess we leave behind. Not just in our country but in the world. When I say the world I think of the young people in Egypt who rose up to seize their freedom and who I now see in pictures in Cairo with Occupy Oakland and Solidarity with Oakland signs. When you have any question, ask someone under 40.
-Louise