00:00:01.690 - 00:00:23.540

That is by Henry and many of you may have missed my April commentary because I postponed it until May 1st. In order to kick off the KP Fa Marathon, I spoke all too prophetically as it turned out about the closed society and the copies are available

00:00:23.549 - 00:00:38.700

in case you're interested. Then when I would ordinarily have been on next May 16th, I was otherwise occupied with events in Berkeley as was this entire station, the implications of those events are still very much with us are likely to be for a long while and

00:00:38.709 - 00:00:58.009

I'm going to talk about them tonight in place of my own analysis. I propose to begin with a fairly long extract from a work of literature published exactly 30 years before the creation of People's Park. Listen carefully and I think you'll hear some rather uncanny parallels

00:01:00.569 - 00:01:19.980

while Californians wanted many things, social success, amusement, luxury, and a curious banking security. The newcomers wanted only two things, land and food, a homeless, hungry man could look at the fallow fields and that man could know that a fallow field is a sin and the unused

00:01:19.989 - 00:01:38.169

land of crime. In the evening, the men gathered and talked together. There's 30,000 acres out west of here laying there. What I could do with five acres of that. Maybe we could get a little piece of her right down there. A patch jimson weed. Now, it

00:01:38.180 - 00:01:53.190

ain't I, it got to have Jims and weed now. And then a man tried, crept on the land and cleared a piece, a package of carrot seeds and a few turnips. And then one day a deputy sheriff, well, what do you think you're doing? This ain't

00:01:53.199 - 00:02:09.589

your land? You're trespassing. The land ain't plowed and I ain't hurting it none. You got damn squatters pretty soon. You'd think you owned it. Get off now. And the little green carrot tops were kicked off and the turnip greens trampled and the Jimson weed moved back

00:02:09.600 - 00:02:25.000

in. Did you see his face when we kicked them turnips out? We gotta keep these here people down or they'll take the country outlanders, foreigners. Sure. They talk the same language, but they ain't the same. Look how they live. Think any of us folks that live

00:02:25.009 - 00:02:43.070

like that and the deputies, fat men with guns slung on fat hips, swaggering through the camps. Got to keep them in line if they argue, shoot first, get tougher than they are. Treat em rough, scare em. And the great owners ignored the cries of history. The

00:02:43.080 - 00:03:00.380

land fell into fewer hands. The number of the dispossessed increased and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms to protect the great holdings. The changing economy was ignored and only means to destroy revolt were considered while the

00:03:00.389 - 00:03:19.250

causes of revolt went on. And the great owners who had become through their holdings, both more and less than men ran to their destruction. Every violence, every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day. The

00:03:19.259 - 00:03:37.300

men squatted on their hands, sharp faced men lean from hunger and hard from resisting it and the rich land was all around them. That of course is from the grapes of wrath and with a touch of updating. It contains just about all the analysis that needs

00:03:37.309 - 00:03:57.509

to be made of people's park, I think for okies, substitute hippies for the owners of fallow farmland in the central valley, substitute private and institutional owners of vacant lots in the cities for carrots and turnips, substitute petunias and little liquid amber trees. And for the physical

00:03:57.520 - 00:04:18.570

hunger of the depression substitute a new class of hungers which are not one whit less desperate hunger for freedom from the dead hand of managerialism. Hunger for alternatives to asphalt, hunger for meaningful work in the companionship of others, hunger for beauty, spontaneity, some kind of relationship

00:04:18.839 - 00:04:38.250

with the natural world. Now, the existential question is not, why did it happen? But what do we do now in this moment, we who crave a society which meets the valid hungers of men and women and Children. Since I believe the end must be pluralistic. I

00:04:38.260 - 00:04:58.299

believe the means must be pluralistic too for many persons of goodwill and answer must be couched in political terms. Just to mention a few possibilities. In this dimension, one, there will be statewide elections next year, start thinking and organizing and working as hard as possible. Right

00:04:58.309 - 00:05:17.609

now, for alternatives to the neanderthals for candidates who have at least some inkling that human evolution for the past several 1000 years has been tending toward innovation and diversity. Two, there will be an election for Sheriff of Alameda County next year. I think I need hardly

00:05:17.619 - 00:05:35.299

point out the ways in which this office affects the people of Berkeley. 35 seats on the Berkeley City Council, an absolute majority including the position of mayor will be up for re election in April 1971. It is none too early for people who want a livable

00:05:35.309 - 00:05:50.540

Berkeley to begin planning. What to do about those five seats. My own view is that only one public figure has come through the recent events with completely clean hands and a truly consistent grasp of the social and psychological forces at work in this city. And for

00:05:50.549 - 00:06:10.450

that matter, in this whole society that man is Ronald Dellums and in my view, he should be mayor of Berkeley. Four city council members should probably be elected by districts rather than on an at large basis, Telegraph Avenue should be one of those districts. This would

00:06:10.459 - 00:06:27.510

require amendment of the city charter five. Another charter amendment will be required to get rid of the city manager form of government under which virtual declarations of war against large segments of the citizenry can be and have been decreed by a man who has never been

00:06:27.519 - 00:06:49.470

elected by any constituency and therefore cannot be gotten at by the recall or any other popular mechanism. Six police power must be brought under civilian control to file complaints about uniformed sadists with the very men who recruited, trained and promoted them is a Alice in Wonderland.

00:06:49.480 - 00:07:07.850

Travesty. Berkeley needs a police review board made up of truly independent civil libertarians. Seven better yet sadists should be kept out of the police department in the first place. If there is any psychiatric screening going on at the present time, it is totally out of touch

00:07:08.209 - 00:07:28.230

with contemporary realities. There may be an attempt to weed out gross Racists but even assuming that is successful, which may be assuming too much the overwhelming problem in police community relations in Berkeley now does not involve racial minorities, but a cultural minority whose culture is indifferent

00:07:28.239 - 00:07:46.070

to personal grooming, financial success, the flag, the bonds of holy wedlock and other bonds by which policemen live. The police call Barrows of this emergent culture creeps and scum and hate them with a venom of the type which used to be reserved to deputies in the

00:07:46.079 - 00:08:03.160

deep South in their dealings with Negroes. It is hardly putting the case too strongly to call this hatred genocidal. There will be no peace in Berkeley until every so called law enforcement officer who carries this kind of vitriol in his heart is replaced by someone with

00:08:03.170 - 00:08:22.059

a more relaxed attitude to human differences. Well, there are a lot of such political campaigns which could and should be mounted by those who are happy and effective in political struggles, but politics aren't for everyone and we shouldn't try to force everyone into this mold. The

00:08:22.070 - 00:08:43.979

French social critic Aloul writes to bear witness to the fact of the technological society by which he really means the managerial society and its institutions such as the University of California is the most revolutionary of all possible acts unquote. I think he's saying what I have

00:08:43.989 - 00:09:04.169

tried to say many times in these commentaries, nothing confounds a bureaucracy more, nothing reveals its dehumanizing character, more unmistakably than for people to simply start acting in an un bureaucratic manner. And demonstrating that such acts tend to confer joy and freedom and fulfillment. To seek to

00:09:04.179 - 00:09:24.609

smash the system directly requires organizing a revolutionary movement. And even if such a movement were to win, which is exceedingly dubious. In my opinion, it would lose because to win in a power struggle on the bureaucracy's terms, it would have to become bureaucratized itself. If any

00:09:24.619 - 00:09:43.770

of you are regular listeners to this series, you will perhaps recall that I have taken a very jaundiced view of some of the rather contrived confrontations last summer, fall and winter. But the building of People's Park seemed to me crucially different from many previous developments in

00:09:43.780 - 00:10:03.090

Berkeley. The park builders did not serve any demands on the bureaucracy. People simply ignored the bureaucrats and started acting like free human beings doing something which was perfectly logical, casual, commonsensical. The worst that could be said of what they did is also the best that can

00:10:03.099 - 00:10:23.929

be said it was very un bureaucratic and nothing has ever laid so bare, the essential inhumanity and un viability of our benign liberal dictatorship as the building of that ugly sterile fence as far as I am concerned, let it stay there as a reminder, lest people

00:10:23.940 - 00:10:42.859

forget the way the center of Hiroshima is still unrepaired and Auschwitz is still there and the Berlin Wall is still there. And other reminders of the extremities to which supposedly enlightened and civilized men are capable of going and repressing men who are different from themselves. Now,

00:10:42.869 - 00:11:00.500

it looks as though the new People's Park, the annex at Hurston Grant is about to be wiped out too. Maybe some people will want to bear witness by sitting down on the sod joining hands, singing songs and being arrested for this crime. I've almost reached such

00:11:00.510 - 00:11:18.460

a point myself where I put a good deal of work into that annex. But I do not feel disheartened. All the victories by the police and the courts are pyrrhic. All of them reveal more persuasively than anything you or I could say the bankruptcy, the shriveled

00:11:18.469 - 00:11:41.159

meanness of spirit, the evident inability of existing institutions to fathom or respond affirmatively to human yearnings of our day. I would say let's not get hung up and possessive. There's lots of vacant land left, move somewhere else, somewhere, unexpected bureaucracies are not able to cope with

00:11:41.169 - 00:11:58.690

unexpectedness of any kind and move on beyond park building. There are any number of other ways to break out of the sickly soft coils in which the managerial society tries to smother and co opt us ways not involving the kind of direct confrontation which will bring

00:11:58.700 - 00:12:18.000

the vicious armored fist out from inside its velvet glove. Take education. For instance, the principal reason why Berkleys pay 50 percent more than anybody else for their so called high quality education is that here, our Children are taught to march in lockstep in classes of 20

00:12:18.010 - 00:12:34.919

rather than 30. We don't have to submit our Children to that kind of damage. Did you know that compulsory school attendance laws don't apply until Children are eight through the crucial years of kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grades, we could prepare them for an autonomous self

00:12:34.929 - 00:12:51.659

actualizing life in people's schools of our own devising as part of people's parks perhaps. I mean, I have an old fogey to think it's pretty important to learn to read and write and add and subtract. But I have personally observed the teaching of these techniques in

00:12:51.669 - 00:13:10.030

public schools made so dull and insulting that perfectly bright Children rebelled and refused to learn. Let the techniques become an organic part of a larger purpose. That's interesting and important. And you couldn't stop Children from learning. Even if you tried, for instance, they might help in

00:13:10.039 - 00:13:28.099

a community sign making project. Don't make noise after 10 o'clock art class here, Friday. All welcome. Please keep on the grass and the like. But the most important kind of education doesn't consist of techniques. It consists of learning to be a real man or real woman.

00:13:28.109 - 00:13:43.890

And above all, a real human being. How is my little boy going to learn anything about being a man from some rigid woman in the public schools, frightened of her superiors, frightened of her pupils, frightened of life itself. I would 1000 times rather entrust him to

00:13:43.900 - 00:13:59.559

the bearded young man. I saw building a tool shed in people's park annex before the police knocked it down. Last Friday. The jos the juices of real life were flowing there and a boy could learn how men talk among one another, how they solve problems, cope

00:13:59.570 - 00:14:17.559

with frustrations, how they make jokes, saw mitered corners, drive nails and a multitude of manly arts. If the authorities descended again and wiped out such a school, well, they might wipe out the physical settings, but they could not wipe out the school because it would consist

00:14:17.570 - 00:14:37.849

of ways of thinking and behaving and would therefore be limitless, portable a vacant lot. Today, somebody's backyard tomorrow inside somebody's living room day after tomorrow. If it rains, there are many, many possibilities like that. We haven't even touched yet like free floating nonprofit stores that would

00:14:37.859 - 00:14:58.859

stay out of the horrendous bureaucratic bag. The Berkeley co op has gotten itself into stay loose. I say stay flexible, imaginative creative, stay in motion to move is to live. Don't fight fire with fire, fight it with water, stay cool, stay fluid. Circumvent the power centers

00:14:59.000 - 00:15:15.960

operate in the interstices. The Marxists object as vigorously as the matigan is to this. But I happen to think it's the way to make a revolution in this particular society at this particular time. And in fact, that's exactly what is taking place whether or not I

00:15:15.969 - 00:15:33.590

happen to like it and Marxists dislike it. People are acting like free men and women more and more. There's a lot of trial and error. Many mistakes and false starts like the drug bit. They will be seen for what they are and people will work their

00:15:33.599 - 00:15:54.179

way out of these blind alleys. The experiments which are truly liberating will be recognized and will be emulated. I think people's parks are among those experiments as would be people's schools, people's stores, people's potting wheels and any number of things that lie ahead create a better

00:15:54.190 - 00:16:11.859

human organization that people will want to join because your life is so much more joyful than theirs that it seems to me is the source of the only form of power that really matters that which opens up greater freedom to choose between alternatives. Well, my time

00:16:11.869 - 00:16:25.989

is more than up if you would care to exercise one of the freedoms that's open to you. You could write to me and care of this station for a copy of either this commentary or the last one or both. This is Henry Anderson in Berkeley. Keep

00:16:26.000 - 00:16:58.429

joyful and keep moving. That was a commentary by Henry Anderson who is the chairman of Citizens for Farm Labor and a freelance speaker and writer. This is rather contrived confrontations last summer, fall and winter. But the building of People's Park seemed to me crucially different from

00:16:58.440 - 00:17:16.280

many previous developments in Berkeley. The park builders did not serve any demands on the bureaucracy. People simply ignored the bureaucrats and started acting like free human beings doing something which was perfectly logical, casual, commonsensical. The worst that could be said of what they did is also

00:17:16.290 - 00:17:34.589

the best that can be said, it was very un bureaucratic and nothing has ever laid so bare, the essential inhumanity and un viability of our benign liberal dictatorship as the building of that ugly sterile fence as far as I'm concerned, let it stay there as a

00:17:34.599 - 00:17:50.040

reminder, lest people forget the way the center of Hiroshima is still unrepaired and Auschwitz is still there and the Berlin Wall is still there. And other reminders of the extremities to which supposedly enlightened and civilized men are capable of going and repressing men who are different

00:17:50.050 - 00:18:06.949

from themselves. Now, it looks as though the New People's Park, the annex at Hurston Grant is about to be wiped out too. Maybe some people will want to bear witness by sitting down on the sod joining hands singing songs and being arrested for this crime. I've

00:18:06.959 - 00:18:23.020

almost reached such a point myself where I put a good deal of work into that annex, but I do not feel disheartened. All the victories by the police and the courts are pyrrhic. All of them reveal more persuasively than anything you or I could say the

00:18:23.030 - 00:18:43.579

bankruptcy, the shriveled meanness of spirit, the evident inability of existing institutions to fathom or respond affirmatively to human yearnings of our day. I would say let's not get hung up and possess it. There's lots of vacant land left, move somewhere else, somewhere, unexpected bureaucracies are not

00:18:43.589 - 00:18:59.030

able to cope with unexpectedness of any kind and move on beyond Park building. There are any number of other ways to break out of the sickly soft coils in which the managerial society tries to smother and co opt us ways not involving the kind of direct

00:18:59.040 - 00:19:16.560

confrontation which will bring the vicious armored fist out from inside its velvet glove, take education for instance, the principal reason why Berkeleian pay 50 percent more than anybody else for their so called high quality education is that here, our Children are taught to march in lockstep

00:19:16.569 - 00:19:31.449

in classes of 20 rather than 30. We don't have to submit our Children to that kind of damage. Did you know that compulsory school attendance laws don't apply until Children are eight through the crucial years of kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grades, We could prepare them

00:19:31.459 - 00:19:46.699

for an autonomous self actualizing life in people's schools of our own devising as part of people's parks. Perhaps. I mean, enough of an old fogey to think it's pretty important to learn to read and write and add and subtract. But I have personally observed the teaching

00:19:46.709 - 00:20:02.589

of these techniques in public schools made so dull and insulting that perfectly bright Children rebelled and refused to learn. Let the techniques become an organic part of a larger purpose that's interesting and important. And you couldn't stop Children from learning. Even if you tried, for instance,

00:20:02.599 - 00:20:19.000

they might help in a community sign making project. Don't make noise. After 10 o'clock art class here, Friday. All welcome. Please keep on the grass and the like. But the most important kind of education doesn't consist of techniques. It consists of learning to be a real

00:20:19.010 - 00:20:32.780

man or a real woman. And above all, a real human being, how is my little boy going to learn anything about being a man from some rigid woman in the public schools, frightened of her superiors, frightened of her pupils, frightened of life itself. I would 1000

00:20:32.790 - 00:20:46.020

times rather entrust him to the bearded young man. I saw building a tool shed in people's Park annex before the police knocked it down last Friday. The choices of the juices of real life were flowing there and a boy could learn how men talk among one

00:20:46.030 - 00:21:02.540

another, how they solve problems, cope with frustrations, how they make jokes, saw mitered corners, drive nails and a multitude of manly arts. The authorities descended again and wiped out such a school. Well, they might wipe out the physical setting but they could not wipe out the

00:21:02.550 - 00:21:19.319

school because it would consist of ways of thinking and behaving and would therefore be limitless, portable a vacant lot today, somebody's backyard tomorrow, inside somebody's living room, day after tomorrow. If it rained, there are many, many possibilities like that. We haven't even touched yet like free

00:21:19.329 - 00:21:38.060

floating nonprofit stores that would stay out of the horrendous bureaucratic bag. The Berkeley co op has gotten itself into stay loose. I say stay flexible, imaginative creative, stay in motion. The move is to live, don't fight fire with fire, fight it with water. Stay cool, stay

00:21:38.069 - 00:21:54.829

fluid. Circumvent the power centers operate in the interstices. The Marxists object as vigorously as the maticans to this. But I happen to think it's the way to make a revolution in this particular society at this particular time. And in fact, that's exactly what is taking place

00:21:54.839 - 00:22:10.329

whether or not I happen to like it and Marxists dislike it. People are acting like free men and women more and more. There's a lot of trial and error, many mistakes and false starts like the drug bit. They will be seen for what they are and

00:22:10.339 - 00:22:27.520

people will work their way out of these blind alleys. The experiments which are truly liberating will be recognized and will be, I think people's parks are among those experiments as would be people's schools, people's stores, people's potting wheels and any number of things that lie ahead,

00:22:28.329 - 00:22:42.750

create a better human organization that people will want to join because your life is so much more joyful than theirs that it seems to me is the source of the only form of power that really matters that which opens up greater freedom to choose between alternatives.

00:22:44.130 - 00:22:55.880

Well, my time is more than up if you would care to exercise one of the freedoms that's open to you. You could write to me and care of this station for a copy of either this commentary or the last one or both. This is Henry Anderson

00:22:55.890 - 00:23:16.010

in Berkeley. Keep joyful and keep moving. She may have missed my April commentary because I postponed it until May 1st. In order to kick off the KP Fa Marathon, I spoke all too prophetically as it turned out about the closed society and the copies are available

00:23:16.020 - 00:23:31.479

in case you're interested, then when I would ordinarily have been on next May 16th, I was otherwise occupied with events in Berkeley. As was this entire station, the implications of those events are still very much with us are likely to be for a long while. And

00:23:31.489 - 00:23:51.239

I'm going to talk about them tonight in place of my own analysis. I propose to begin with a fairly long extract from a work of literature published exactly 30 years before the creation of People's Park. Listen carefully and I think you'll hear some rather uncanny parallels

00:23:53.829 - 00:24:13.630

while Californians wanted many things, social success, amusement, luxury, and a curious banking security. The newcomers wanted only two things, land and food. A homeless, hungry man could look at the fallow fields and that man could know that a fallow field is a sin and the unused

00:24:13.640 - 00:24:32.140

land of crime. In the evening, the men gathered and talked together. There's 3000 acres out west of here laying there. What I could do with five acres of that. Maybe we could get a little piece of her right down there. A patch jimson weed. Now it

00:24:32.150 - 00:24:47.469

ain't iron. It got to have Jims and weed now. And then a man tried crept on the land and cleared a piece, a package of carrot seeds and a few turnips. And then one day a deputy sheriff. Well, what do you think you're doing? This ain't

00:24:47.479 - 00:25:04.189

your land? You're trespassing the land, ain't plowed and I ain't hurting it none. You got damn squatters pretty soon. You'd think you owned it. Get off now. And the little green carrot tops were kicked off and the turnip greens trampled and the Jimson weed moved back

00:25:04.199 - 00:25:20.099

in. Did you see his face when we kicked them turnips out? We got to keep these people down or they'll take the country outlanders, foreigners. Sure. They talk the same language, but they ain't the same. Look how they live. Think any of us folks live like

00:25:20.109 - 00:25:38.689

that. And the deputies, fat men with guns slung on fat hips, swaggering through the camps got to keep them in line. If they argue, shoot first, get tougher than they are. Treat em rough, scare em. And the great owners ignored the cries of history. The land

00:25:38.699 - 00:25:55.949

fell into fewer hands. The number of the dispossessed increased and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms to protect the great holdings. The changing economy was ignored and only means to destroy a revolt were considered while the

00:25:55.959 - 00:26:15.209

causes of revolt went on. And the great owners who had become through their holdings, both more and less than men ran to their destruction. Every violence, every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day. The

00:26:15.219 - 00:26:33.609

men squatted on their hands, sharp faced men lean from hunger and hard from resisting it. And the rich land was all around them. That of course is from the grapes of wrath and with a touch of updating, it contains just about all the analysis that needs

00:26:33.619 - 00:26:54.239

to be made of people's park, I think for okies, substitute hippies for the owners of fallow farmland in the central valley, substitute private and institutional owners of vacant lots in the cities for carrots and turnips substitute petunias and little liquid amber trees. And for the physical

00:26:54.250 - 00:27:15.699

hunger of the depression substitute a new class of hungers which are not one whit less desperate hunger for freedom from the dead hand of managerialism. Hunger for alternatives to asphalt, hunger for meaningful work in the companionship of others, hunger for beauty, spontaneity, some kind of relationship

00:27:15.969 - 00:27:35.770

with the natural world. Now, the existential question is not, why did it happen? But what do we do now in this moment, we who crave a society which meets the valid hungers of men and women and Children. Since I believe the end must be pluralistic. I

00:27:35.780 - 00:27:56.250

believe the means must be pluralistic too for many persons of goodwill and answer must be couched in political terms. Just to mention a few possibilities. In this dimension one, there will be statewide elections next year, start thinking and organizing and working as hard as possible right

00:27:56.260 - 00:28:16.209

now, for alternatives to the neanderthals, for candidates who have at least some inkling that human evolution for the past several 1000 years has been tending to innovation and diversity. There will be an election for Sheriff of Alameda County next year. I think I need hardly point

00:28:16.219 - 00:28:34.550

out the ways in which this office affects the people of Berkeley. 35 seats on the Berkeley City Council, an absolute majority including the position of mayor will be up for election in April 1971. It is none too early for people who want a livable Berkeley to

00:28:34.560 - 00:28:50.060

begin planning what to do about those five seats. My own view is that only one public figure has come through the recent events with completely clean hands and a truly consistent grasp of the social and psychological forces at work in this city. And for that matter,

00:28:50.069 - 00:29:10.910

in this whole society, that man is Ronald Dellums and in my view, he should be mayor of Berkeley. Four city council members should probably be elected by districts rather than on an at large basis. Telegraph Avenue should be one of those districts. This will require amendment

00:29:10.920 - 00:29:27.969

of the city charter five. Another charter amendment will be required to get rid of the city manager form of government under which virtual declarations of war against large segments of the citizenry can be and have been decreed by a man who has never been elected by

00:29:27.979 - 00:29:50.510

any constituency and therefore cannot be gotten at by the recall or any other popular mechanism. Six police power must be brought under civilian control to file complaints about uniformed sadists with the very men who recruited, trained and promoted them. He is an Alice in Wonderland. Travesty.

00:29:51.260 - 00:30:09.369

Berkeley needs a police review board made up of truly independent civil libertarians. Seven. Better yet sadists should be kept out of the police department in the first place. If there is any psychiatric screening going on at the present time, it is totally out of touch with

00:30:09.380 - 00:30:29.550

contemporary realities. There may be an attempt to weed out gross Racists but even assuming that is successful, which may be assuming too much the overwhelming problem in police community relations in Berkeley now does not involve racial minorities, but a cultural minority whose culture is indifferent to

00:30:29.560 - 00:30:47.839

personal grooming, financial success, the flag, the bonds of holy wedlock and other bonds by which policemen live. The police call Barrows of this emergent culture creeps and scum and hate them with a venom of the type which used to be reserved to deputies in the deep

00:30:47.849 - 00:31:05.089

South in their dealings with Negroes. It is hardly putting the case too strongly to call this hatred genocidal. There will be no peace in Berkeley until every so called law enforcement officer who carries this kind of vitriol in his heart is replaced by someone with a

00:31:05.099 - 00:31:24.890

more relaxed attitude to human differences. Well, there are a lot of such political campaigns which could and should be mounted by those who are happy and effective in political struggles, but politics aren't for everyone and we shouldn't try to force everyone into this mold. The French

00:31:24.900 - 00:31:47.079

social critic, he writes to bear witness to the fact of the technological society by which he really means the managerial society and its institutions such as the University of California is the most revolutionary of all possible acts unquote. I think he's saying what I have tried

00:31:47.089 - 00:32:07.859

to say many times in these commentaries, nothing confounds a bureaucracy more. Nothing reveals its dehumanizing character, more unmistakably and for people to simply start acting in an un bureaucratic manner. And demonstrating that such acts tend to confer joy and freedom and fulfillment to seek to smash

00:32:07.869 - 00:32:28.329

the system directly requires organizing a revolutionary movement. And even if such a movement were to win, which is exceedingly dubious. In my opinion, it would lose because to win in a power struggle on the bureaucracy's terms, it would have to become bureaucratized itself. If any of

00:32:28.339 - 00:32:48.300

you are regular listeners to this series, you will perhaps recall that I have taken a very jaundiced view of some of the rather contrived confrontations last summer, fall and winter. But the building of People's Park seemed to me crucially different from many previous developments in Berkeley.

00:32:49.260 - 00:33:07.479

The park builders did not serve any demands on the bureaucracy. People simply ignored the bureaucrats and started acting like free human beings doing something which was perfectly logical, casual common sensical. The worst that could be said of what they did is also the best that can

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be said, it was very un bureaucratic and nothing has ever laid so bare, the essential inhumanity and un viability of our benign liberal dictatorship as the building of that ugly sterile fence, as far as I'm concerned, let it stay there. As a reminder, lest people forget

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the way the center of Hiroshima is still unrepaired and Auschwitz is still there and the Berlin Wall is still there. And other reminders of the extremities to which supposedly enlightened and civilized men are capable of going and repressing men who are different from themselves. Now, it

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looks as though the New People's Park, the annex at Hurston Grant is about to be wiped out too. Maybe some people will want to bear witness by sitting down on the sod joining hands, singing songs and being arrested for this crime. I've almost reached such a

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point myself or I put a good deal of work into that annex, but I do not feel disheartened. All the victories by the police and the courts are pyrrhic. All of them reveal more persuasively than anything you or I could say the bankruptcy, the shriveled meanness

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of spirit, the evident inability of existing institutions to fathom or respond affirmatively to human yearnings of our day. I would say let's not get hung up and possessive. There's lots of vacant land left, move somewhere else somewhere unexpected bureaucracies are not able to cope with unexpectedness

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of any kind and move on beyond Park building. There are any number of other ways to break out of the sickly soft coils in which the managerial society tries to smother and co opt us ways not involving the kind of direct confrontation which will bring the

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vicious armored fist out from inside its velvet glove. Take education. For instance, the principal reason why Berkeleian pay 50 percent more than anybody else for their so called high quality education is that here, our Children are taught to march in lockstep in classes of 20 rather

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than 30. We don't have to submit our Children to that kind of damage. Did you know that compulsory school attendance laws don't apply until Children are eight through the crucial years of kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grades, we could prepare them for an autonomous self actualizing

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life in people's schools of our own devising that is part of people's pucks. Perhaps. I mean enough of an old fogey to think it's pretty important to learn to read and write and add and subtract. But I have personally observed the teaching of these techniques in

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public schools made so dull and insulting that perfectly bright Children rebelled and refused to learn. Let the techniques become an organic part of a larger purpose that's interesting and important. And you couldn't stop Children from learning. Even if you tried, for instance, they might help in

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a community sign making project. Don't make noise after 10 o'clock art class here, Friday. All welcome. Please keep on the grass and the like. But the most important kind of education doesn't consist of techniques. It consists of learning to be a real man or real woman

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and above all, a real human being. How is my little boy going to learn anything about being a man from some rigid woman in the public schools? Frightened of her superiors, frightened of her pupils, frightened of life itself. I would 1000 times rather entrust him to

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the bearded young man. I saw building a tool shed in people's park annex before the police knocked it down. Last Friday, the choices the juices of real life were flowing there and a boy could learn how men talk among one another, how they solve problems, cope

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with frustrations, how they make jokes, saw mitered corners, drive nails and a multitude of manly arts. If the authorities descended again and wiped out such a school, well, they might wipe out the physical setting but they could not wipe out the school because it would consist

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of ways of thinking and behaving and would therefore be limitless, portable, a vacant lot today, somebody's backyard tomorrow inside somebody's living room day after tomorrow. If it rains, there are many, many possibilities like that. We haven't even touched yet like free floating nonprofit stores that would

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stay out of the horrendous bureaucratic bag. The Berkeley co op has gotten itself into stay loose. I say stay flexible, imaginative creative, stay in motion to move is to live. Don't fight fire with fire, fight it with water.