We at Berkeley are no strangers to protest.<\/p>\n
At the Turning Point USA protest last November, I watched our anger boil over the barricades; in January, I witnessed the \u201cICE Out\u201d rally as it traveled from Downtown Berkeley to Mission Dolores Park. On the day of the \u201cNo Kings\u201d walkout, in a Saturday morning slump, I marched down to Sproul Plaza to protest the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
As the mass of us began to move down Bancroft Way, a nervous energy permeated the air, an apprehension that seemed to stem not from fear of retaliation, but from an uncertainty of what to do, of how to make history happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody cares anymore,\u201d I heard someone say. Somebody agreed, saying that this whole thing was a little \u201cawkward.\u201d I tried to trace their voices in the crowd, but their conversation was quickly carried away by a clumsy call-and-response chant.<\/p>\n
Walking among these people, the sun hot on our heads, our shoulders touching, feet fumbling, the arms of all ages reached towards a common cause; I felt, very deeply, that I couldn\u2019t not protest; I was, and am, witnessing my country make a mockery of itself by the day.<\/p>\n
How could we not care? People are dying. There is a genocide in Gaza, an apocalyptic war in which the blood of civilians is streaked across the hellscape that is our modern-day media. We face a climate crisis that threatens to sink not only cities, but whole nations within our lifetimes. At the heart of this ostensibly free world, an authoritarian sits in a tacky, gold office, and from our phones, we witness people living their day-to-day lives in squalor. And it\u2019s this \u2014 the inconceivable pain that extends beyond the suffering we see, spanning generations and desperately reaching toward us in pieces and pixels, that made my care for the cause come in a numb buzz.<\/p>\n
Shortly after I attended this rally, someone asked my boyfriend if I had become one of those \u201ccrazy radical Berkeley liberals.\u201d I could only laugh. I have feared for a long while that I am far less than that; \u201cradical\u201d in thought, sure, but I go to bed comfortably enough. And as I tuck myself in and think of the indescribable injustices of today and tomorrow, I feel my guts knot up. Yet, I wake up the next morning; I go about my day like it\u2019s all a bad dream.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve found a certain excitement that comes from feeling as if I\u2019m a part of a cause, that I\u2019ve done something that matters, that I participated in an event that I can be proud of when I\u2019m older. Yes, I was there, yes, I was on the right side of history. When democracy was under attack, we stood up \u2014 we fought back!<\/p>\n
But at the end of the \u201cNo Kings\u201d rally, this began to feel like less of a fight and more of a facade as a circle of protesters formed on Crescent Lawn. Individuals shouted out their sentiments \u2014 we all cheered. Except, as this display went on, a boy beside me talked about some essay he had to write. And amid the increasingly scattered whoops and whistles, a man debated with a woman whether they should get pizza or pasta for dinner. As they bickered, a lady began to shout her support for the current speaker, but she did so too early. Quickly, she covered her mouth.<\/p>\n
After the TPUSA protest, I heard someone say, \u201cGod, that was so f—ing cool.\u201d There had been a fight, phones filming, a bloodied man in a bright red shirt. I had the awful feeling that some people had wanted the fight, that they had given up on peaceful protest because it didn\u2019t feel like it was doing anything. Not that the fighting did anything, either, but the blood was real, the outrage solidified.<\/p>\n
Like millions of others, I have looked at the horrors that are happening, again and again; protested them, again and again. Standing firm amongst the crowd, though, I began to feel that it was futile.<\/p>\n
Disturbingly, I have felt myself begin to simply go through the motions of what feels right. I like to ask myself what I can do to help out, and feel good that I\u2019m thinking about that. I see only half of the horror through my phone screen, and give that scrap of enlightenment my best blank gaze. Slowly, I have become comfortable with the uncomfortable; my moral outrage has become mundane.<\/p>\n
The morning of the \u201cNo Kings\u201d protest, I found myself in the mirror, disheveled and disheartened. I felt in my heart that I am complicit in all of my critiques, and I didn\u2019t feel like eating. In a daze, I stepped onto Sproul Plaza, cried out for democracy, went home and did nothing but lie in bed for the rest of the relentless 24 hours.<\/p>\n
To be in a state of constant discomfort is a necessary condition for political advocacy, one that many of us \u2014 including myself \u2014 are currently failing to fulfill. We are losing the ability to feel in the face of violence, for we have been taught to consume it quickly and move on. We lose the means to make a difference through calculated organization, and, mistaking popularity of opinion for power, we leave revolutions to die before they make it past the chambers of change.<\/p>\n
In a world where it\u2019s easier than ever to move on from one issue to the next, our generation must learn to recognize its detachment from the causes it wishes to support. Feeling as though our country is falling into fascism, the start of our solution being to stand in the park and hope to be saved falls short of radicality; rather, it comes across as a means to comfort ourselves.<\/p>\n
Maybe you are one of those who are uncomfortable enough; perhaps you are properly disturbed, the discomfort lingering as you find the morning after each fight that the same autocrat remains in office. You let it kill you over and over again, and from that you find the means to sustainably mobilize, past a protest that ends in the same way it began. You need to let it kill you, for our distress turned to desensitization has resulted in movements reaching their conclusion as opposed to a start for tangible, continuous action.<\/p>\n
Any day now, I think, is a good day to come anew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We at Berkeley are no strangers to protest. At the Turning Point USA protest last November, I watched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[30517,764,4004,2871,78311,7733,143,145,144,2058,26656,1695,30724],"class_list":["post-363616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bancroft-way","tag-berkeley","tag-gaza","tag-ice","tag-mission-dolores-park","tag-no-kings","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-protest","tag-sproul-plaza","tag-trump-administration","tag-turning-point-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}