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Indybay Feature

What We Lack is Life.

by Spread the discontent
It’s not cheap books nor high grades,
what we lack is life.
what-we-lack-is-life.pdf_600_.jpg
As it stands, we’re all fucked. With tuition hikes and the latest cuts in the higher education budget, we are graduating only to end up in a jobless market with a shit load of debt. We’re confronted everywhere with a shared incapacity to respond and fight back. We’re allowed to exhaust ourselves, appealing to an administration that knows very well how to ignore us, or involving ourselves in activist groups like PIRG that exist only to quibble over details.

Look, we’ve been really patient. Putting up with the daily humiliations and complete isolation while we write essays and take tests to get our standardized knowledge so that we can be properly formed into the perfect white collar worker. Are these our lives? We are working shit jobs longer, harder, and cheaper to, in the end, earn an increasingly useless piece of paper, mounting debt, and, in this job market, a spot at the same service industry counter-top/bus-tub/POS we thought - were led to believe - we were working away from.

Last month, facing shared conditions, students all over California raised a collective middle finger and said "Srsly, yo? FUCK this." University buildings were seized and occupied, Regents meetings were stormed and disrupted, and the general ennui of student life was cast off in a struggle whose aim was escalation. Cali is steppin’ up, now it’s our turn.


No contact information- we’re not recruiting. We’ll meet you later, in an occupied dorm, at the bar, or behind barricades built with previously useless textbooks.
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by student from the valley
This is some tight shit. Keep it up.
by A Cook
"a spot at the same service industry counter-top/bus-tub/POS we thought - were led to believe - we were working away from"

I learned that lesson in the 80's when I was 16 yrs old and working as a dishwasher with guys who had passed the bar exam and were serving drinks. So I learned how to cook and now 20 some yrs later, I'm still at it.... We live in a service economy, maybe you should go to culinary school instead of UC.
by c
It's true. Being around top professors for subjects like history is really helpful for digging deep into the subject, and efficiently immersing yourself in a topic. They know how to put a syllabus together and ask the right questions. It is better than memorizing a bunch of material for an AP test, and more challenging than community college.

At the same time, everyone in society should have a chance to be exposed to humanities, and you will hopefully continue to learn after you graduate, or if you weren't talented enough to get into a UC. It involves actively searching out material at the library. The UC isn't a vocational school, and often you might be starting at step one at whatever company you start to work at, learning their procedures.
by uc graduate
hey c, talent isn't what determines who gets into a UC.
by Brother
Peace,
I agree with what you are doing. Too often these movement go in the wrong direction. I am not saying I know the answers. I agree with the occupation efforts etc. I highly suggest those organizing look at the history of other UC movments, like the long history of Berkley. I know its not the sixties. But there are huge similarities the kind of tactics used. Some that worked, and those that did not. They fought for better cheaper equal access to education, free speech, against the war, then it was Peoples Park. Not everything went great. Not everyone looks back at every occupations and protests as a victory. Mistakes were made you could very well learn from them.
Keep up the good fight.

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