It was the 8th of March yesterday and for the very first time since long, there was no 8th of March gathering to go to. Unsettling. Can’t think of a greater contrast with last year, when i had to decide whether to be in Belgium or in Istanbul for the 8th, and ended up being around for the preparations of Istanbul, and flying in to do 8th of March stuff in Leuven and Antwerpen. Can’t help thinking of the Belgian Women’s Day (11th of November) two years ago when MarÃa and i decided to take a break and not go (imagine, being able to make the decision not to go, yet another possibility in places where Women’s Day means something) where we got into the dream of coming to this place, and how disconnected i feel from that dream now.
But it ended up being sweet – Berna and Feza invited us to go to the screening of Darwin’s Nightmare with film-maker Hubert Sauper in the grand Del Mar cinema theater. Hubert just got back from the Academy Awards where those stupid penguins (of course the animals are not stupid, it’s the film) won instead of the fish. An impressive film about globalization, its big structural mechanism and its little agents who most often know well what they are doing, what is happening to them, but see little alternative. The images are still running around in my head, a film to be seen and digested slowly. Maybe i’ll write something more about it later.
There was a march on the 7th, Marcha Laboral – Custodians March for Justice. It was on campus at 6.30 pm, so custodians could join and we could we could march to the residence of the Chancellor, Denise Denton, to demand that the custodians’ wages are raised at least to the level of those in neighboring colleges (Cabrillo, Monterey) now – and then later we can go on to discuss living wages. There is no excuse, the financial scandals (of excessive spending on top wages) the university got itself involved makes it quite indecent not to do so. One custodian was talking about how she works on this campus since 15 years and earns only $ 4 more than when she started. And then everybody is hit by the high PG&E bills this winter – raising the wages now would amount to nothing more than very basic dignity.
Try to imagine how such a march looks like. A dark cold forest, for that is how campus looks like after 6 pm these days. There were more of us than last time, we were perhaps 80 (and yes, there are hundreds of students living in well-hidden residences all over campus, but most of them don’t come out for a march, that is how campus looks like these days). So there we marched through a dark cold forest, holding candles to light our way. And chanting for ourselves and for the ancient forest. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido never sounded more ghostly, and it so much more resembled some spiritual ritual instead of a political mobilization.
A great need to get my head around the difficulties (to think well, to write something that could make a difference, to do politics) and traps of campuses like these, and i take look at what Chris called the idiotic (and i think i agree) book of Baudrillard on America. Sadly enough his observation on the UCSC campus is not so far off:
“There is a science-fiction story in which a number of very rich people wake up one morning in their luxury villas in the mountains to find that they are encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstancle, a wall of glass that has appeared in the night. From the depths of their vitrified luxury, they can still just discern the outside world, the real universe from which they are cut off, which has suddenly become the ideal world. But it is too late. These rich people will die slowly in their aquarium like goldfish. Some of the university campuses here remind me of this.
Lost among the pine trees, the fields, and the riviers (it is an old ranch that was donated to the university), and made up of little blocks, each one out of sight of the others, like the people who live in them: this one is Santa Cruz. It’s a bit like the Bermuda Triangle (or Santa Barbara). Everything vanishes. Everthing gets sucked in. Total decentring, total community. After the ideal city of the future, the ideal cosy nook. Nothing converges on a single point, neither the traffic, nor the architecture, nor authority. But, by that very token, it also becomes impossible to hold a demonstation: where could you assembly? Demonstrations can only go round and round in the forest, where the participants alone can see them. Of all the Californian campuses, famous for their spaciousness and charm, this is the most idealized, the most naturalized. It is the epitome of all that is beautiful.”
“Our bizarre zoning regulations that force single-use zones (housing only–no mixed housing and shops or offices etc.) in order to preserve property values, which in turn feed local tax bases, have already wreaked an unintended and hazardous consequence for those who have to live there. We are less fit, less healthy; we use more health care services more frequently and earlier on in our lives than ever before; we spend $12.00 going to the local strip mall just to get a pint of milk (gas cost, car loan/lease or cost of capital plus the car’s depreciation); and we have become so afraid of outsiders from having spent three generations riding about in our hermetically-sealed cars that we incarcerate ourselves in super-sized McMansions and starter-castles behind high walls and security gates.
