1960s Berkeley Students Sowed Victimhood in Nearby Ghettoes

(Family before Berkeley students destroyed their neighborhood)

     Being rebellious is a rite of passage for many young people who often carry values and tradition very lightly in their personalities when they leave home to become their “own person.”  Ironically, this happens in the helter skelter “wilderness” of a university.

    Fraternities were becoming more and more passé at the University of California at Berkeley during the early 1960s and beyond.   The anonymity of such a mega-university was dehumanizing to most entering freshmen.  This soul-deadening “consolidation” was quite apparent everywhere on campus.  Free Speech Leader Mario Savio picked “Do not fold, bend, mutilate, or spindle” as the theme of his famous speech atop a police car in 1964.

    So where could real community be found beyond disciplinary enclaves?  Well, the Old Left remnants still around found that card tables at the Sather Gate “commons” could be used to handout “provocative” and rebellious literature, in accord with the spirit of teenage rebellion.  Girls found boys, and boys found girls.  Add in sex, drugs, and rock music–the New Left was born.  Hedonism causes sins to be forgotten.

      But politics must be fueled by outrage and manufactured grievances.  The Civil Rights Movement had a reform point to it, but few foresaw that it would be the revolutionary key to social change in the decades ahead, still proceeding as a juggernaut.  After a night of free love, drugs, and rock music, students could self-righteously jump into a demonstration singing “We Shall Overcome.”  Parents became the bad guys.

     Even worse, “missionary” Berkeley students needed revolutionary soldiers.  The ocean of blacks (then called “Negroes” even by radicals) become the door-to-door target of young white students.  Most blacks weren’t politically aggrieved.  Their lives were poor, but also enriched and happy.  Hatreds hadn’t been inculcated.  Time to convince these “Uncle Toms” that their lives were a lot worse off than they thought they were.   Too bad, look at communities like Oakland today.