Forum Post: I visited Occupy UC Davis today

Hi everybody, Dave here from Occupy Oakland -- I was visiting my mom out in Sacramento. Had a great thanksgiving/indigenous people's day. Last night my mom and I saw "Margin Call", a Hollywood movie about the '08 market crash that was somewhat less than total fluff, pretty decent I guess, and that was at the Crest downtown so I was able to visit Occupy Sacramento really briefly. They seem like a really cool bunch of folks; they are not being allowed to camp and their solution for now is to set up the tents every day, take them down, and set them up the next day. That is a lot of work and I really respect them for doing all that to keep a physical presence in the heart of the State Capitol of California.

Today after the great lunch my mom made with turkey and cranberry sauce and all that great stuff, I was able to hang out for a couple hours with the good folks at Occupy UC Davis. This is by far the most impressive of all the camps I've visited so far, I mean I really love these people. They have a whole shrine of sorts to the victims of the brutality last week. They have built a geodesic dome! I love it! They had it covered with blue tarps to keep out the rain. I talked to tons of really intelligent and conscious people of all ages, you know, the students and all sorts of people who had come out from town to provide the feast and to enjoy the good vibrations and show support.

They were excited to meet somebody like me who was expressing solidarity and love and admiration from Occupy Oakland. Our shit has been pretty confused lately, still I am inspired every day in small ways, but I am truly deeply inspired by the students there at UC Davis who remained in place with arms locked when the chemical spray was battering their faces.

And I pushed my hands together tight and even though I'm an atheist I wanted to pray for a better world when I was standing there in the spot where they were attacked. I know that it wasn't evil people really who attacked them or who ordered for the attack; if you give the police these weapons, sooner or later they'll find an "emergency" where they get to use them. I truly believe it when I say, "It's an evil system." And I don't mean capitalism, I mean corporatism and neoliberalism and colonization.

I'm really excited about the actions planned on Monday at UC Davis and all over the UC system to protest the fact that college education here in California cost $300 per semester for our parents and $15,000 for the kids today. That's almost what I paid in the 1990s to go to private college. People are starting to doubt that it's worth it.