This here is an image of the famous (at least at the University level) Mario Savio, one of my political heroes. Savio was a very outspoken UC Berkeley Student fighting for student and civil rights in the sixties. This photograph not only captures Savio's intensity and the anger of the police force, but beyond the focus point there are people: hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Savio and his peers united, coming together to protest and stand and fight for what they believed in. Our modern generation is at a loss for what to fight for. We often wonder what is worth fighting for, or even how to fight for that which we may be passionate about. This is not because the school systems, the politics, and the community are so perfect that we should not work for change. This is because we have been raised to be content with our surrounding environment and conform to the status quo.
As I have gotten older and more confident in myself, I have firmed my personal and political perspectives. I will now confidently affirm that I am a self-defined leftist liberal (non-violent though!). I was having a conversation with a friend last year when I admitted that a career in politics might interest me. After saying that I added: “Even if I want to be a politician I will never get voted into any office; not without softening my political platform first.” I thought about that statement when I was reading several of Mario Savio’s speeches this term. I knew that I could not stand as an individual with strong, maybe sometimes radical, political goals and earn votes. I could not strive to make the political changes from within the political sphere unless I changed my goals to fit the status quo. EVERYTHING is about the status quo. Uniqueness does not fit in; does not get in, a concept taught, enforced, and maintained by politics and the university systems. As Savio said back in the sixties, "the university is well structured, well tooled to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well rounded person." Students were, and still are, generally taught not how to be individual and unique, but how to fit in with society. By abandoning our positions to join the majority, we accept what is the majority and blind ourselves to what needs to be changed. There is a veil over our eyes, held by the status quo. Mario Savio lifted that veil in the sixties, but since then it has fallen back, increasingly heavier. He taught his peers and perhaps the whole student generation of the sixties to deny the goals of the status quo and fight for what they personally believed in. This generation now still holds specific issues at heart that do not conform to the status quo but are either too timid to make that opinion clear or just do not know how.
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