What I saw was the best of a generation, not because they took themselves as representative of some vanguard, utopian future, but as an integral part of the long, slow, and brutal work of remaking spaces for democratic process. While I write, the brutality continues at UC Davis, and students remain patient and resistant. There is no better public school, it would seem, than an encampment.
For the youth who make up these occupations, bourgeois or working class, there is no harder lesson than the fact that the world we live in will not only ask you to take its blows, but to live past them, to be thankful for them, and to celebrate the safe return of well-cleaned, non-violent concrete where the rats can come out at night to collect scraps of a clerk’s sandwich. We will throw all your books into a dumpster and call on you to fight for legislation to refund public libraries. We will put you in solitary confinement for weeks and then ask that you maintain your manners. We will put you in a bomb suit on a road to Fallujah and then ask you to be a good, strong mother, to teach your children the values of giving. We will take away your home and then declare that your encampment is simply bad for local business. What should be understood as basic human services are re-written as forms of entitlement for which you must beg.</quote>
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/a-defense-of-dreaming-in-public/
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)