Pepper

In grad school, I was involved with the graduate student union.  While I have mixed feelings about unions, I really believed in this one.  The graduate TAs and GAs unionized when they hadn't had a pay raise for over a decade, had no benefits, no health insurance.  They were doing important work for the university, for other students (graduate and undergraduate), and for various branches of learning (including agriculture and the sciences) and weren't able to make ends meet.  At that particular university, the grad students did a third of the teaching and two-thirds of the grading, so it was no wonder they felt that they should be better rewarded for their work.  As an aside, a number of other groups also felt shorted and unionized against the university, including clerical and technical staff, and even a portion of the university faculty.

I was a part of the union the year we were bargaining for a new contract.  While I was sorry that I didn't have the time to be a part of the bargaining team, I turned up for every event that I could manage, including the most awesome one (in my opinion): a grade-in.  The TAs and GAs didn't do anything special or different than usual.  We just took our stacks of grading from our office to the floor of the administrative building.  We spread out our papers on the floor and sat cross-legged and peacefully caused a little bit of gridlock for the administrators who wanted to cut our health insurance and pay, even as they raised university housing by five percent.  And, as a side-note, tuition doubled between 2004 and 2011.  Doubled.


But my point is, I'm a big fan of the peaceful protest.  I believe that there's no better way to educate the people you're trying to change than show them who you are and what you do in a peaceful way- no yelling, no screaming, no throwing liquids of any kind (or solids, for that matter).  I just think that pacifist protest is really the way to get things done.

Then again, when we did our grade-in, we didn't get pepper-sprayed at point blank range by the police.

I don't go to UC Davis, and I've never had any affiliation with them, but I was horrified (as I'm sure many people were) to see a video of seated students and non-students being pepper-sprayed and manhandled by the police.  I thought it was especially ironic that the Chancellor (Linda Katehi) said that camping out on campus was not allowed because it posed a safety issue to students.  I imagine that's true, especially if the students are having their sculls fractured by thrown canisters of tear gas, which actually happened to one protester.

While I have no affiliation with the school, I do have a lot of sympathy for the protesters.  I'm a young, well-educated adult and have consistently struggled to make ends meet since I finished my dual masters.  I have many of the same frustrations as all of the "Occupy" movements, and a big part of me feels like the pepper-spraying and tear-gassing of peaceful protesters is a big fat analogy for the whole reason they're out there protesting in the first place.

I'm not totally finished processing this, but I think I have two hopes for the outcome of this event having been widely broadcast.  The first is that I hope it doesn't deter people from demonstrating their dissatisfaction with a broken system.   If there's anything that we can learn from large-scale, long-term peaceful protesting, it's that it doesn't achieve results overnight.  And secondarily, I hope that it encourages everyone, police or student or otherwise, to practice peace and compassion.  As angry as watching the video made me, it was a good reminder that violence doesn't just come in the form of pepper spray.