Making restaurant patrons ever so slightly uncomfortable in Santa Nella, CA.
He could just as soon be searching in vain for my daily posts for National Blog Posting Month. Which, around these parts, sputtered and degraded into National Blog Sporadically Posting Month, or NaBloSpoPoMo.
All the same, lard love me, I’m still up on the horse. Even if it has paused to pee. And the rest of the herd has long since galloped by.
Today, a Day of Action, called by popular vote at the General Assembly the night of November 9, was held. An “Open University”
Please forgive the advert that precedes this 17 minute clip from Robert Reich’s historic–yes, it’s not even a day old yet, and it’s clear it will be looked back upon as historic–speech to 10,000 gathered at Occupy Cal tonight (Tuesday night, Nov 15). It was the 15th Annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, long scheduled for this night, though previously located indoors at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union, which faces the administration building at the other side of Upper Sproul Plaza.
Lest this movement be misunderstood as rudderless or aimless, note that 10,000 were more or less rapt with attention, laughing at side jokes about the Koch brothers.
Here’s the link to the KGO of most of the whole speech on their own page.
Highlights of Reich’s speech:
Soon to be gap-toothed grin, Berkeley, CA.
Front right tooth: not long for this world. Grin it’s in: only just getting started.
We were moving from books ‘n milk to the brushing of the teeth, stations two and three of a five-station, post-dinner nightly journey that ends with lullabies in bed and, for the elder and more insomniac of the pair, rambling conversations about the larger questions of life.
All this rhythm and ritual has been road-tested by years of parenting and a statistically significant number of controlled experiments (no ritual? bedlam!). It’s no simple matter, to ease their young bodies and minds from the hurly-burly of the day into the waiting arms of Morpheus. Before, I would never have put such stock in this kind of stuff–in fact, I would have considered it far more “routine” than “ritual,” and derided it. No longer. I’ve learned.
I had just finished reading Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen to the boychild whilst the girlchild bore a hole in page after page of her latest American Girl historical yarn. We were gathering our things, and the boychild was already heading into the bathroom on Mama’s back. I had been thinking something as I was reading Night Kitchen. I’m not sure what led me to it, but I made the judgement call that his older sister was old enough to hear a little something about the slings and arrows that fly around the books they read.
#OccupyCal General Assembly at, like, 11:30pm Wednesday night. UC Berkeley’s Sproul Steps. (Image from @occupyoakland here).
Obviously unprovoked police violence against peacable assembly took place earlier in the day. And it had the classic impact that unprovoked police violence can have, when witnessed by enough people who are just entitled enough, and just unaccustomed enough to that unprovoked police violence. And just aware enough of what it represents, and just fed up enough about it all.
Aggregation of The Daily Cal (student paper) coverage of Nov 9 Day of Action here; a single article (filed at a yeoman 1:07am Nov 10) here: “Drawing on Occupy movement, protesters turn out en masse” (Curan Mehra & Mihir Zaveri ).
Really cool sketch of what was happeneing where, when, by Danny O’Brien, re-Tweeted by my über-rad colleague Liz Henry, who hied herself across the bay to live videocast the occupation.
Stuff tends to happen here. Free speech is a fairly passionately held belief here.
Continued from last Saturday: 20+ questions from my special niece for a middle school project she was doing. Now answered after she began high school half a year later. (Hi, Mickey!)
Footage and interviews of participants in the General Strike in Oakland last Wednesday, November 2, sent by a chum, Lisa Denenmark, who helped shoot it. I couldn’t go, but I am proud to say my mother-in-law was there, and took my nephew, who racked up hella stories to tell his chums in middle school about how thrilling it is to stand up and be counted for what you believe in.
(Not like it’s anything new to him: he was among the youngest people phone banking at the Berkeley campaign headquarters for Obama several years ago, and has been to several rallies for immigration reform and the Dream Act in the past several months. He’s a regular with us at Pride; here he is a couple Prides ago, navigating the treacherous combo of MUNI vents and streetcar tracks on rollerblades, no less, with our rainbow flag as superhero cape. Yeah, I’m not worried about the next generation.)
If you are curious what participants had to say for themselves about why they were there, take a listen.
[Added note! It was totally viewable last night, and is marked private now, and I can't even get to see it via the link in the email my chum sent. So. My apologies; I'll reinstate it if I can later. You'll have to take my word for it that it was great. Yay! It's back! Except that the soundtrack is drowning out the voices. Check back in again, 'cause I'm sure this is getting tweaked, too.]
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Looking Eastward down E.41st St. from the NYPL, New York, NY.
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