This morning’s breaking news about a massive police presence at People’s Park comes as good news to those of us who (1) recognize the need for more student housing at Cal, and (2) are tired of bored, agitated “activists” breaking the law and repeatedly getting away with it.
Overnight, heavily-armed cops in riot gear, Sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement essentially invaded People’s Park, rousting the squatters who camp there, evicting them, and erecting a wall of shipping containers around the park’s perimeter so the homeless people can’t return. The situation will remain unresolved until higher courts determine whether Cal can go through with its long-frustrated plans to erect student housing on the site.
I have great respect for activism in the East Bay, going back to Mario Savio’s day, but the landscape has changed considerably since then. Protesting the Vietnam War was an honorable reaction to a war which most historians now judge to have been a horrible mistake by the U.S. People’s Park, on the other hand, over the years has become a joke: a dirty slum where people with too much time on their hands clap themselves on the back while virtue-signaling how special they are for standing up to the racist, uncaring corporate entity known as the University of California. We saw the same self-righteous types gathering in support of the horrific slum at the Wood Street Encampment. These same sorts of activists can always be counted on to trash downtown Oakland anytime there’s a police shooting of a Black man. They’re all of the same type: malcontents who believe they have to “fight the system” to achieve “equity” for all, especially people of color.
While noble in its own way, this goal is unachievable. To begin with, how will we know when “equity” has been obtained? You can’t assess something if you can’t measure it. For another thing, at what price will this supposed “equity” be had? The cost of pitting one ethnic or racial group against another is simply too high for us to pay, at a time when the nation is already tearing apart at the seams. These observations seem to me to be irrefutable, and yet we have “revolutionaries” out there who don’t seem to realize the harm they’re doing. I speak, not only of the virtue signalers at People’s Park, but also of politicians such as Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Sheng Thao and Nikki Bas, all of whom have built lucrative careers on the flimsy infrastructure of racial grievance and resentment. All people carry resentments in their hearts—we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. Normal leaders try to unite us despite those dark impulses at our cores—think of Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” Abnormal leaders seek to divide us, in order to further their own gross ends. In this Götterdämmerung twilight struggle, truth and reality become obscured, which is the whole point of activists. They want their truth to be accepted as the truth by everyone else. They want to be the repository of good; anyone who disagrees with them is evil. Clearly, this is the path to madness, if not something worse: civil war.
I’m sure the People’s Park activists are not going to go quietly into the night. Even at this moment, they’re communing in apartments along Hillegass Avenue, Haste Street, Dwight Way and Telegraph Avenue, plotting their next steps. Those shipping containers present them with a real problem, though. They can’t climb over them. Can they set them on fire? Violence, unfortunately, is always an option when it comes to the activist left. They know it’s the only way for them to get the publicity they crave.
Steve Heimoff