The Love Connection

So, readers, I'm not perfect. (Did you catch that, yet?) Not by a long shot. And I wasn't always spiritual or thoughtful with regard to my actions. In the spirit of self analysis echoed in my previous post about the coup d'état, I have elected to do some reflection. Am I phoenix mellowing?

Looking through a letter I wrote some years back, It occurred to me that I forgot I was a firecracker. I espoused the ills of a broken and ubiquitously foul system that seemed unfair and without regard for justice.

I marched, protested, wrote, and agitated. I vowed never to mellow, and never ever to sell out.

And yet, with age, I think that you have to mellow. Maybe what we ascribe to "mellowing" is really growth.

I wrote a letter in the Daily Cal years ago in response to an activist group called the "Third World Liberation Front." I wrote a vehement angry letter in response to a law student who dismissed the cause that the students lauded. His father wrote an equally angry letter back to me chastising me for my naivety and rhetoric. It was part of an even angrier stalemate between conservatives and liberals on campus, amplified by the move in the country to end quotas, and the golden age of affirmative action.

Although I don't retract the basis of my sentiments, I don't feel proud of my desire to tear my opponent to shreds--and literally that is what I did. I ripped him a new one by misusing my gift of writing. (If Mr. Ogar is out there, I deeply apologize. It was childish and wrong.)

As I read the original source of my rage, I was reminded of the pain I felt while at Berkeley during that period. I'd trudged my way through substandard education and tracking to make it through high school into one of the most elite public universities in the country.

I'd been scourged by the lack of warmth and belonging that I hoped to feel from both black and white students in my huge elective sections. I felt alone in an environment where most of the students who looked like me had parents more well to do. I experienced a new kind of discrimination that was insidious and cloaked. I recalled the weight of my grandparents, which grew up in the red Texas dust, who were never able to reach the level of education attainment they desired because of racial discrimination.

This only deepened by insecurities leading me to believe that like an insect infestation, or a reoccurring rash, I was painfully unwanted, irritating, and redundant part of University life. By the time our Black graduation speaker gave her keynote address, I was in tears. I cannot remember her name, but I will always recall her words, "We are here. We weren't supposed to be here, but we are here."

It was never about the letter, it was about the fact that I not only had to prove myself as a student, but as a Black student.

And while I still believe in justice, activism and agitating, especially in the aftermath of election 2000, and Bush the sequel, since leaving Cal, I have changed. I am less appaulled, yet still affected. More likely to try to understand the other perspective. Less likely to believe that our political system has the solutions to the human condition. If I were to read Jeff's letter today, I'd probably point out a few points of argument, chuckle, shake hands, and move on.

And I would have been at peace, in love and charity, trusting in God.

I think of this period in my life and I am reminded of a glib little number I heard in "Something New" "At the end of the day it is just a man and a woman, and the love connection."

Corny but true? Really, at the end of the day, politics aside, it is about human beings. And yes, the (agape)love connection.


I am reposting the letters from the Daily Cal here:

TwLF Not Challenging Criminal Justice System

Letter-writer Darren Noy uses a lot of nice liberal buzzwords in his defense of the twLF ("Creative Innovators, Not Childish Cowards," Sept. 14). He even pretends to start out as an unbiased observer, only to finish with the same tired Berkeleyite mantra that I have heard since my childhood.

Let's just set a few facts straight for the record, though. First, the twLF is not challenging the criminal justice system, they are spoiled students attending one of the finest universities in the world (and at taxpayer expense) who are upset because liberal arts and social sciences as a whole are facing budget cuts.

These "activists" know that the squeaky wheel will get the grease ... especially if it's a squeaky wheel of color in the Bay Area.

Second, the demand for amnesty has nothing to do with any thoughtful political agenda. Liberals have been enjoying "political" arrests for years ... smile for the cameras, suffer no consequences.

Those students who are still being prosecuted assaulted the police. They're learning what a "real" arrest is like because they really deserved to be arrested. They just don't like being held accountable for their actions because, again, they are spoiled children.

Finally, please spare us all the "poor Mumia" speech that seems to infect every liberal cause in America. Mr. Abu-Jamal is not a political prisoner, he's a cop-killer. He can have visitors in his maximum security prison; the police officer he murdered can only be visited at his gravesite. How about a little sympathy for him and his family, and a little less crying over these spoiled brats?

Jeff Ogar
Boalt Hall law student, 1999


No Oil Needed in These Wheels, twLF Reviving ?Fight'
BY MICHELLE MILAM
Thursday, September 23, 1999


In Jeff Ogar's letter to the editor ("twLF Not Challenging Criminal Justice System," Sept. 16) he characterizes the members of the third world Liberation Front as "spoiled children" and "squeaky wheel" minority rebels protesting a cause that is merely symbolic.

If we believed Mr. Ogar's characterization, twLF members appear to be privileged welfare babies earning their degree at the expense of taxpayers. How ironic such well-manicured ideological foliage should come from a law student.

Please save us the verbal sodomy. It is rare to find a student these days that doesn't receive some kind of financial assistance or work to finance their educational needs. This is true even of law students. Ogar's characterizations only serve to divert attention away the real point of his argument; namely, he has none.
Ogar writes, "the demand for amnesty has nothing to do with any thoughtful political agenda," and adds that the twLF is "learning what real arrest is." The students of last spring's protests were students fighting for a cause they believe in passionately and are committed to making change.

They set goals and objectives and worked actively to achieve them. If they are fighting for amnesty for some of the students who risked their education for a cause they believed in, does that make them spoiled? The overlooked activists of our generation are labeled spoiled and frivolous. I wonder how many times our parents were fed the same line.

Yes Jeff, we understand that part of traditional non-violent protest is to accept consequences and allow the oppressor to see the injustice of his/her actions. Now ask yourself why did Robert Kennedy lobby to get Martin Luther King out of jail? Non-violent protest is more complex than a bunch of impermeable, regurgitated theories and ideas. When one steps out of the ivory tower and steps into real life, one sees that strategies evolve over time.

The students have already "suffered" more than most of us would. Regardless of how you feel about their politics, one thing is true: while the majority of us were warm in our beds, they were in jail. They should be commended for their activism rather than play armchair academics, they acted.

Ogar's piece does not lack merit; it lacks a healthy dose of reality. Maybe in the glow of academic analysis this would seem to be a case of a bunch of rowdy college students protesting for a dying department; I concede these arguments probably would make one a very good lawyer. Unfortunately, that's all they make.

Academia has greatly underestimated the power of of the determined few. If the twLF is not committed to change and cooperative effort, time ultimately reveals all truth. I'd like to believe that if your cause is just someday justice will be rendered, but for many justice is a empty word intellectuals sprinkle on ideological pallets like sugar.

Perhaps someday in a loftier time someone will credit twLF with reviving the fight to keep the voices of the unheard alive at UC Berkeley during a crucial period for all students at the university. I hope Ogar and the rest of the "spoiled" masses kick around this question: how many of us would go to jail for what we say we believe?

Michelle Milam is a UC Berkeley senior. Send responses to opinion@dailycal.org

twLF of Today, 1969: Both Meaningless in Real World
BY RICHARD OGAR
Tuesday, September 28, 1999


Since Michelle Milam invoked the holy words "our parents" in her attack on my son, Jeff Ogar, I thought I was perhaps entitled to a response ("No Oil Needed in These Wheels, twLF Reviving ?Fight,'" Sept. 23).

During the 10 years that I successfully evaded the draft by remaining in college, I was a "political activist," marching for "civil rights," against "the War," on behalf of "People's Park." I was on the staff of the Berkeley Barb and, I thought, a bona fide member of "the counterculture."

It was, oddly enough, the original twLF student strike in 1969 that made me realize, with its outrageous list of "non-negotiable demands" and endless practice of the art of the political tantrum, that there is perhaps nothing less meaningful in the "real world" than the passionately-held political beliefs of hypergonadal college students.

The sad legacy of the 1960s is the sense of personal "entitlement," regardless of individual merit or effort, that festers on every level of present-day American society, and has reached a terminal stage in academia. The proliferation of special interest "departments," each armed with the blunt instruments of "post-modernism" and "critical theory," has tended to move university curricula beyond the "interdisciplinary" to the merely "undisciplined."

Unfortunately, academia has not "greatly underestimated the power of the determined few," but has yielded to it again and again, with increasingly dire results.
If Milam truly believes that her life as a UC Berkeley student represents the "real world," she had best be prepared for something more than "verbal sodomy" once she hits the streets. As G. Gordon Liddy noted, like it or not, "the world is a bad neighborhood at three o'clock in the morning."

But the real world at least has this to offer: While criminals may plead false innocence, while they may escape punishment by means of the latest legal gadgetry, they don't try to argue that they should be able to go home just because they passionately believed in what they did.

Richard Ogar is a UC Berkeley staff member. Send responses to opinion@dailycal.org.