This essay was initially revealed on Dashka Slater’s Substack, A Sigh of Aid, which you’ll join right here.
I used to be homeless once I began school on the College of California, Berkeley. First-year college students weren’t assured housing in these days, and I’d been unable to safe a spot in both the dorms or the student-run housing co-ops. Over the summer season, I’d utilized for rooms in dozens of shared homes and residences listed on the College Housing Workplace, however no person wished to lease a room to a 17-year-old freshman. And so, as my first day of faculty approached, I used to be couch-surfing, spreading out my sleeping bag within the dwelling rooms of the daughters of my mother’s buddies and acquaintances, most of them a lot older than me and visibly unenthusiastic about my presence.
Lastly, I used to be determined sufficient to reply to an advert for a room that had been posed on the bulletin board of considered one of Berkeley’s co-op supermarkets. The room, in a rambling wood-shingled North Berkeley home, was beautiful, but it surely got here with a catch. The residents have been the remaining members of a Nineteen Sixties commune that had dwindled practically to extinction. I might solely be allowed to remain if I ultimately agreed to affix a “group marriage” with individuals a number of many years older than me.
Sure, which means precisely what you suppose it does.
I efficiently dodged this dedication for a few months, dutifully showing for the occasional communal dinners however skedaddling as quickly as I’d cleared my plate. However my lack of curiosity in even speaking to the opposite individuals within the commune, a lot much less, er, marrying them, didn’t go unnoticed. Originally of November, I got here residence from faculty to discover a observe taped to my door telling me I wanted to maneuver out. In what felt like a miracle, the identical day I used to be kicked out of the commune, I lastly landed a spot in a scholar co-op.
It is because of this, maybe, that I’ve adopted UC Berkeley’s 55-year quest to construct scholar housing on the location of Individuals’s Park with specific curiosity. To today, 10 % of Cal college students are homeless, with the college offering housing for under 23 %. But regardless of my firsthand expertise of the housing disaster, as a scholar I dutifully adopted the place of my fellow campus leftists: Individuals’s Park was a sacred website, an ecotopian image, a legacy of scholar activism that should proceed in its present state for evermore.
The story of Individuals’s Park began in 1969. The college had razed the houses on the two.8-acre property years earlier than with the intention of utilizing the land for scholar housing, however then had left it as a vacant eyesore. When college students and native residents determined to show the lot right into a type of neighborhood backyard, the college responded by fencing it off. On Might 15, impressed by scholar physique president-elect Dan Siegel, who urged the gang to “go down and take the park,” 3,000 protesters marched towards the park. Regulation enforcement turned out en masse to cease them. Because the Bancroft Library writes:
The confrontation rapidly turned violent with demonstrators throwing bottles and rocks, setting vehicles alight, and smashing fireplace hydrants open. Regulation enforcement first responded with tear gasoline, after which with shotguns loaded with rock salt, birdshot, and buckshot.
Within the ensuing riot, a bystander, James Rector, was killed by police, one other was blinded, and plenty of extra have been wounded. Gov. Ronald Reagan declared a “state of utmost emergency” and dispatched 2,700 members of the Nationwide Guard to implement a curfew and a ban on public gatherings.
And thus, an emblem was born.
“The Park is an emblem to those that help it of freedom and the battle for freedom…To some, the Park is an eyesore to the neighborhood. To others, it’s an oasis the place one can freely specific themselves,” park activist Ron Jacobs wrote in 1981.
I used to be a scholar across the identical time these phrases have been written, and my job as a lobbyist for the leftist scholar authorities required me to faux that I noticed Individuals’s Park as Jacobs described it—as a holy area, an emblem of Freedom and Group and Sticking It To The Man.
In actuality, what I noticed at Individuals’s Park have been fights, drug use, canine and human shit, and individuals who have been both drunk, excessive, experiencing a psychotic episode, or some mixture of the three. At night time, I averted strolling anyplace close to it, for a similar causes I averted anyplace with an abundance of unlit greenery and teams of inebriated males.
However even because the park itself deteriorated, the story of the park flourished. In the course of the Nineteen Nineties, I coated the battles over the park as a reporter, as soon as spending a whole weekend at a type of collective remedy session for activists, residents, and police who had participated within the ritualized battles over the park for many years. These battles solely served to cement Individuals’s Park as a spot the place symbolism existed independently of expertise, generally with tragic outcomes.
Because the Los Angeles Instances recalled lately:
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, a machete-wielding activist infuriated by the college’s development of volleyball courts on the park was shot and killed by police after she broke into the campus residence of then-Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. Police stated they discovered a observe within the teenager’s bag. It learn: “We’re prepared to die for this piece of land. Are you?”
And so it has continued up till the current second. “It’s not the land solely, it’s the historical past. You’re taking a part of Berkeley historical past,” a demonstrator defined final month throughout yet one more spherical of pro-park protests.
However by then, the gulf between image and actuality had turn out to be unattainable to bridge. In early January, the college made a shock assault through the useless of night time and rapidly erected a double-high wall of transport containers across the park’s periphery earlier than bulldozing the lot fully. There was actually no land left to defend. Solely the historical past. The image.
Nonetheless, the story wasn’t completed. Earlier this month, the dispute went earlier than the California Supreme Court docket. Two neighborhood teams—Make UC A Good Neighbor and The Individuals’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group—had sued the college to dam its plans to construct housing for some 1,100 college students and 100-plus previously unhoused and very-low-income individuals, whereas conserving 60 % of the lot as publicly accessible open area and erecting a memorial to commemorate the park’s historical past. The teams argued that the college ought to have assessed the noise the scholars would generate and thought of various websites.
These arguments, which prevailed in a decrease courtroom, appear unlikely to cease the undertaking now—not since final 12 months, when the state legislature preemptively handed a state legislation saying universities don’t must do both of the above when constructing scholar housing.
What’s fascinating to me, at this level, is why a number of the campus radicals I went to varsity with are nonetheless combating this battle. Certainly advocates for the homeless should see that housing 1,200 individuals will do extra to deal with native homelessness than permitting a pair dozen individuals to camp within the park. And in the event that they don’t see that, why not?
In January, 4 of the founders of Individuals’s Park wrote in The Nation that the park has spent the previous 50 years as “a website of the unhoused, the deranged, and the forlorn.” However they have been nonetheless not prepared to contemplate the park a failure.
“Individuals’s Park, at its greatest, was an expression of the utopian yearnings of a era that sought to make a greater world,” they wrote, arguing that if solely the college had acted otherwise, it might have lived as much as these ambitions.
In my thoughts, at the very least, Individuals’s Park is an expression of one thing else completely. Fairly than utopian yearnings, it represents the best way symbols could be separated from their precise significance. Irrespective of how stunning the dream of Individuals’s Park was, the fact was fairly completely different—and has been for many years. But the discourse stays unchanged and untouched 12 months after 12 months. That is what symbols do. They’ll persist lengthy after their which means has left the constructing. Simply ask The Cross.
It occurs with astonishing regularity. Consider all of the instances when a person offender has been used to represent Crime Writ Giant, as when Richard Allen Davis, who killed 12-year-old Polly Klaas within the early Nineteen Nineties, was utilized by California politicians to move the horrific three strikes legislation that drastically elevated the period of time individuals served in jail. (About one-third of California prisoners immediately are serving sentences prolonged by that legislation.) And think about how historic figures have turn out to be stand-ins for political beliefs, and the way wounded we regularly really feel once we study of their flaws. Does Thomas Jefferson embody America’s virtues or its vices? What about Abraham Lincoln? John Muir?
Think about how the fitting has used trans children as symbols of the Breakdown of Society, or all of the political mileage each the left and the fitting can get by merely mentioning the acronym DEI. Take into consideration the best way US realtors responded to the “racial reckoning” of 2020 by eradicating the phrase “Grasp Bed room” from its lexicon, quite than truly tackling housing discrimination and predatory lending. Weapons, flags, vehicles, abortion, marriage, Israel, Palestine—when a phrase alone is sufficient to conjure a whole political discourse, that the stark simplicity of the image has eclipsed the messy complexity of actuality.
We’re, by nature, symbolic thinkers. It’s a part of what makes us human. However symbols are there to signify abstractions, to not change them. Too usually, we waste our time arguing in regards to the symbols themselves, quite than working for the beliefs they’re imagined to signify. Actual change can solely occur once we see issues as they’re—sophisticated, concrete, and contradictory.
Was Individuals’s Park an excellent triumph or an abysmal failure? In symbolic phrases, it should be one or the opposite. Solely once we take away the load of symbolism can we see it because it actually was: just a little of each, and a variety of neither.