March for Higher Education

I am very new to protesting, my first protest was against proposition 8, right around the time of the election back in November. Monday I went to my first march, and last weekend was my first excursion to Sacramento. I really enjoyed it, both the city of Sacramento itself and all the people I met there, as well as the March. In fact, I am considering going into SF for the Iraq War Anniversary protest this weekend. Not so much because I want to protest the war, I will have a sign I imagine, but my main goal would be to take pictures. I've realized that I really enjoy taking rally/protest pictures. The first pictures along these lines I took were on 4/20 2008, at the big celebration at UCSC. The UC tried to lock down the campus by not allowing any traffic on unless by special permit, and not letting the buses on either. This meant that for the majority of the people going to 4/20, we had to walk from over a mile away. I personally walked nearly 2 miles from my parking spot to the Porter field, where the celebration takes place. That wasn't so much a rally or a protest, as people trying to have fun and facing harsh opposition, but I digress.

Monday was very different than 4/20, today was a formalized march with police enforcement. Having all of those police around was a little unsettling for me, I kept expecting someone to do something stupid then a fight to start and escalate to police brutality. It was a pretty tame protest all things considered. I ran out of the group to throw my coffee cup away as soon as I could, which happened to be in front of a hotel. One of the guys that worked at the Hotel moved over to intercept me, as if he expected me to do something "radical." When I got to the trash can before him, and he saw I was just throwing something away he nodded nervously, then moved away when I got back into line. That was probably the closet thing to "radical" behavior I saw.

I felt a little lost at first, since I went there on my own, instead of with the rest of SJSU. I had been in Sacramento since Saturday, for a friend's birthday party. When I first got to Raley field I was pretty confused, I didn't know why we were protesting at a baseball field. I heard the SJSU group coming, joined up with them, and my friends from political science filled me in on the details, namely the fact that a march implies marching somewhere. It had not previously occurred to me that "March for Higher Education," was in fact a double entendre, it was a march in march. Up until this point I thought the name simply meant it was in March.

The March itself was pretty uneventful, I made a lot of jokes about protesting and collective action, tasteful and not demeaning. After passing countless police and security professionals, we finally got to the steps of the capital. The energy was pretty high for a while, but it died off when the speakers started. Some were better than others, and it's hard for me to pick a best speaker since many were quite good. There was an obvious worst speaker though, and that was the lieutenant governor. All he managed to do was parrot our own slogans back to us, in a 5 minute speak he must have used the phrase "doors of education" at least two dozen times. He actually managed to break John McCain's "Joe the Plumber" record, which is pretty amazing.

On the walk back to my car, I noticed a homeless camp along the banks of the river we crossed while marching. I stopped to take a picture of it, because it was touching for me. I was there to protest budget cuts, that keep kids out of college, when kids can't get into college what options do they have? Menial jobs, crime, or homelessness, at least those are my feelings on it. After I took my pictures a nearby man approached me, and asked if I was a writer. I said yes, since I already expected to blog about my day, and the man began to tell me a bit about himself and his two friends. The three of them were the homeless men living at the camp I just photographed, and they were there watching and supporting the students. He told me to "tell the people how we feel." I'm assuming he meant to tell either the students or the legislators, and I'm sure the we referred to the homeless. I will do my best to keep my word to him, because people need to know, about the plight of the homeless, the plight of the students, and the impotence our of legislators. This blog is only the beginning of my involvement. After the march I really want to be more involved in student protesting, against the budget cuts and prop 8 namely, but I will undoubtedly find more projects to work on.

See pictures I took of the protest here.