Transcribed Robert Reich’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture from yesterday:
I’ll be short.
47 years ago, as you know, we were graced with the eloquence and the power of Mario Savio’s words from these steps. And they were words that echoed and ricocheted across America. Words about the importance and centrality of freedom of speech and assembly and freedom of expression and social justice. And those words continue to live on. In fact, the sentiments and words that Mario Savio expressed 47 years ago are relevant, if not more relevant today than they were then. Because today, unlike them, we have a few Supreme Court decisions that have said essentially that money is speech and corporations are people. When you think that money is speech and corporations are people, it becomes extraordinarily important to protect the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans, of regular citizens, of students, of everybody else that doesn’t have the money and who is not a corporation. I believe if corporations are people, let Georgia and Texas execute them.
The First Amendment right to speech, that is not always convenient. It is not always inexpensive. It is sometimes messy. And because it’s sometimes inconvenient and sometimes expensive and sometimes messy, just like democracy, there is a temptation sometimes to want to contain it, to limit it. But it is more important than it has ever been that we all go out of our way, everyone of us—leaders, politicians, those of us who have authority, and those of us who do not have authority—it becomes doubly important that we honor the First Amendment and that we are willing and make ourselves willing to pay the price of freedom of speech and also indirectly—or, because freedom of speech is so related to democracy—directly the price of a democratic system of government.
In 1964 the issues that Berkeley students wanted to speak up about, the issues that actually underlay this Free Speech Movement, were issues having to do fundamentally with civil rights, the struggle for civil rights, the struggle for voting rights. Also the gathering storm of the Vietnam War and war in Southeast Asia. Also the grinding poverty that America was then experience in our cities and also in rural America. Well as you all know, although we have made some progress, many of these kinds of issues, issues of fundamental social justice, are still very much with us. And for that reason, it is doubly important that our democracy give people the opportunity to speak up about what must be done. Enable our democracy to function as it should function. Not with money. Not simply with privilege. But with the ability of people to join together and make their voices heard.
The issues today that Berkeley students want to speak up about—and I don’t want to be presumptuous, you have different issues. Some of you are extraordinarily dedicated and concerned about rising fees and tuitions so high in fact and coming so readily and quickly that they are making higher education unaffordable, unavailable to so many young people who are otherwise qualified. And that is a valid and deeply valid and important concern. Some of you are concerned also about the increasing concentration of wealth and income in our society. An increasing concentration that has meant that the top 400 richest Americans now own more of America than the bottom 150 million Americans. Now fundamentally—and let me try to connect some of these dots—fundamentally the problem with concentrated income and wealth, and fundamentally the problem with an education system that is no longer available to so many young people, and even a K-12 system that is letting so many people down, the fundamental problem is that we are losing equal opportunity in America. We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy are built.
Now there are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer. We cannot afford as a nation to provide social services to the poor. We cannot, some people say, any longer afford as a nation to provide the safety nets for the poor and the infirmed or for people who fall down for no fault of their own. Well how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before? How can that be true that we cannot afford to do all sorts of things that we need to do for our people when we are the richest nation and continue to be the richest nation in the world?
And again, let me connect the dots, because over the last 3 decades, this economy has doubled in sized. But most Americans have not seen much gain. If you adjust for inflation, what you see is the median wage has barely risen. Where did all the money and resources go, class? They went to the top. And look it. Let’s be clear about this. We are not vilifying people because they are rich. The problem here is when so much income and wealth go to the top, political power and influence also go to the top. Particularly when, as I indicated to you, there are no longer any controls on the amount of money spent on politics. And I don’t want to pick on David and Charles Koch. Alright, I will. I mean they are emblematic of the problem. It is not wealth per se, it is irresponsible use of the wealth to undermine our democratic system. And today, unlike the time in which Mario Savio was here and talking—then the typical CEO in America was earning 30 times what the average worker was earning. Today, the typical CEO in America is earning more than 300 times what the average worker is earning. You see, again, the problem has to do with what that does to our democracy. It undermines our democracy. When all that money can come down from the wealthy, from the corporations, when there are no limits to the amount of money that can infect and undermine and corrupt our democracy, then what do we have left? What do we have left?
I want to tell you something. And that is how proud I am to be a member of this wonderful community. Not only is Berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley the best system and institution of public education in the world, but more importantly, it has for years, for decades, dedicated itself to the principles of free expression, of social justice, and of democracy. And implicitly, we understand the connections between all of those points. You must also and in fact I am sure you do, feel in your gut that the Occupy Movement—the Occupy Cal, Occupy Oakland, occupations going on all over this country—are ways in which people are beginning to respond to the crisis of our democracy. And I am so proud of you here today. Your dedication to these principles, your willingness to be patient, your willingness to spend hours in General Assembly, your willingness to put up with what you have already put up with, is already making a huge difference. You’re already succeeding.
Some of you may feel a little bit, “what are we doing here? What exactly is our goal?” I urge you to be patient with yourself. Because with regard to every major social movement of the last half century or more, it started with a sense of moral outrage. Things were wrong. And the actual coalescence of that moral outrage into specific demands or specific changes came later. The moral outrage was the beginning. The days of apathy are over, folks. Once this has begun, it cannot be stopped, and will not be stopped.And one final point, the summer before Mario Savio was here on these steps, he was down in Mississippi registering voters. That was Freedom Summer of 1964. If you can permit me a personal note: because I was always short for my age, and I was always very short—in fact when I was a little boy, I was even shorter—I was always getting beat up. There are always bullies. But you know what I did? I learned at an early age, the way to stop getting beat up is to make alliances with bigger guys who are older than I and also bigger than I was, and they protected me. They were my own protection racket. And one of the boys during the summers that I spent up in the mountains with my grandmother, one of the boys who was a protector of me, older than me, his name was Micky. And I grew very fond of Micky. And in that same summer of 1964, that same Freedom Summer, Micky – his full name was Michael Schwerner – Michael Schwerner and two other civil rights workers were down in Mississippi exactly the same time that Mario Savio was there, they were brutally tortured and murdered by racists who felt that they, my friend, my protector, and his two colleagues, were a threat to the status quo in Mississippi. Well when I heard that Micky Schwerner had been brutally murdered, that my protector from the bullies himself had been murdered by even bigger bullies, I sensed that something fundamental had to change. Not only in American society, but also in me. And all of you, right now, understand intuitively, that if we allowed America to continue in the direction it was going, with the wealth and the income and the power and the political potential for corruption that all of that represents, that the bullies would be in charge. And you know and you understand how important it is to fight the bullies. To protect the powerless. To make sure that the people without a voice have a voice. And for that reason—if there were no other reasons, though there are many others—I want to thank each and every one of you for what you are doing. Thank you.
TV is so good right now.
More life lessons from Petey D, this one coming out of nowhere after a review of the dosing regimen of spasmolytic agents (dantrolene 25 mg with a max daily dose of 100 mg qid):
You cats are already in this generation, and I’m resisting it as much as I can — I’m not resisting the generation, don’t get me wrong, but I’m resisting the imposition of technology in my life, meaning:
I think the technology is outstanding. It is outstanding and it is astounding. The technology is astounding. It’s just, it’s unbelievable. Really it is. Now, you were born into it. A guy like me, I’ve been around for a long time. The fact that you can write a little something on a little doodad over here, you know, and it goes to somebody in South Africa like *that* and they respond to you – Lord have mercy, man, that’s magical. But the issue is, how do you use that technology? And are you able to resist the narcissism that is at the core of how the technology is being used now? That’s a major issue. ‘Cause there’s an incredible narcissitic element to it, and that is this notion of Facebook, and Twitter, and Myspace, and Your Space, and My Face, and Your Face. They give you the notion that you are at the center of the world. That’s a narcissistic notion to begin with. And it gives you a notion of somehow you’re connected…You’re not connected to anything.
Lastly — and I’ll shut up – I understand that now Facebook has an app [...] where you can send at any moment in time what it is that you’re doing in your life at this moment, and it’ll be archived. Right? Let me ask you a question. Do you believe that a good life does not have secrets? What do you think about that? Do you wanna have a life that has no secrets? Do you wanna live a life where you are on the stage all the time no matter what it is that you’re doing? Talk about narcissism. Do you want somebody to pick up, 5 or 10 years down the road, from this archive up in the clouds some place, some of the cute little things that you might have done during a period of irrationality. Do you want that? Do you want that out there? That’s my subversive comment to you.
Lastly, with regard to education. The education is not on the screen. The education is not in the internet. The education is in here, your mind. And, I’m not the only person to point this out – people are writing books about this stuff now. Because people can go to the internet and get an answer, it leads people to think that they are informed. That’s not being informed. That’s being able to press a button and have something come out. That doesn’t mean you’re informed. To be informed is to create synaptic connections. Those can only happen when you study material, not only in a visual way, but also in a written way, where you write, you make diagrams, you move things around, use both sides of your brain to learn things. So that’s my plea to you. Please. While you indulge the technology, please do not surrender your identity, your privacy, and also the plasticity of your mind to learn by other means other than a visual representation on a screen.
Hannah wonders why I love the hardest class in all our coursework, and Gina wonders why I have the structure of morphine on my wall. It’s because the professors are so great, and not just because Eris and I had a round of tequila with them last semester. I especially like it when the dean gives some of the lectures, because he graduated from college as a teenager and is some sort of medicinal chemistry GENIUS, but he also looks and talks like a Brooklyn mobster. He told us how back when he was just an associate professor, he got mad for some undisclosed reason and punched a hole in the wall of his office, and they made him dean shortly after. Equal parts brilliant and terrifying. Anyway the other day he randomly got on his soapbox for 4 minutes in the middle of an anticonvulsants lecture and no one dared to breathe:
When you’re in an acute health situation [...] you say to yourself, ‘Why me? Why is this happening to us?’ And then you look around at the families around you, at a place like St. Christopher’s, where we lived for 3 months. We didn’t go home for 3 months. We lived there. We lived outside the ICU. We slept on the couches out there. And what you see are families with children that are suffering beyond any imagination. Kids that are caught in fires. Kids that have cancer. Kids that have untreatable diabetes. All kinds of things. You see horror. Literally you see horror. And you say to yourself – once you get past the initial thing of, ‘Why me?’ – you say to yourself, ‘Why not me?’ [...] That’s what you say to yourself, ‘Why not me?’ What is it that makes you so special that you think that something, tragedy isn’t going to affect you? And it’s not funny, I’m not being dramatic here, okay. I’m being a regular human being [...] The only thing we share with each other in this damn life is our experience. that’s what we share. We don’t share anything else. That’s what one generation shares with the generations coming up, is their experience. Anybody can come in here and talk about what they read. Anybody can do that. The issue is, have you touched what you talk about? That’s the issue.
The next thing you realize, if you’re a health professional, is, you walk into the ICU — you see drugs, you see fluids, you see people using these products without a second thought. Without a thought about potency, sterility, proper pharmacokinetic directions, and so on. you don’t think about it for a second. And that is what civilization’s about. That’s what you are about. You are about maintaining civilization. That is not an overstatement. You expect that when you go into a hospital setting, that they are there and they are going to do what they can for you. That they are going to take these things off the shelf and they can do miracles. So just keep that in mind. The next time somebody in your family gets a little bit ill, even just a little bit, and has some kind of a fever, or whatever it is. You are able to take care of that with a capsule or a tablet or a liquid or an injection. This is very serious stuff. You’ll forgive me for getting a little bit emotional about it, but I’m sorry. When you experience something in your life like this, you never lose that emotion. What you do is you use that emotion to kindle, to try to understand what is happening in this life. What is happening in this life. And don’t think, don’t anybody in this room think that you’re going to escape the rain. Nobody escapes the rain. And the unfortunate thing is, that the in the culture that we live, we somehow believe that we’re going to walk through the raindrops.
Now I’m sure there are many of you in the room that have people in your family that have suffered one way or the other. And I’m sorry to say, in the future, you may have others. So those of you that have gone through something like this, you know what I’m talking about. Nobody misses the rain. The rain falls on everybody. The issue is, are you prepared at the time? Are you prepared by your knowledge to maybe contribute to help what is happening in front of you, even while you are being confronted basically by the devil himself?
Oct 3 – 20 soft pretzels for $5. Yup.
Oct 01 – Study snack.
Oct 02 – Fancy snuggie?
This is what happens when you go shopping with a Phillies fan.
Hurricane warning the weekend I’m supposed to move (for the second time in a month). A fitting end to a tumultuous summer.
Let’s get this party started.
A couple of crazy kids scrubbing down a drained pool after dark, because that sort of thing is so necessary after a 12-hour work day. One of those my-life-is-a-boy-meets-world-episode moments.
