the world changed.
U.C. Berkeley had recently issued a rule against political activity on campus, which some quite correctly challenged. The University had Jack Weinberg arrested for political leafletting and thousands of students spontaneously sat down around the cop car. Weinberg, the car and the cops were held captive for 33 hours by a mass of sitting students pretty much completely filling Sproul Plaza.
Thus began the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It took 3 months of demonstrations, meetings, speeches and protests, sit-ins and mass arrests to break the ban, but it was broken.
This was the first such campus direct action of the sixties by largely white middle class students. There followed a decade of direct action by students and others of the nation's youth, aided and abetted by a plentiful supply of sympathetic adults. Often referred to as "the student movement" this outpouring of activism and direct action was brought to bear on a wide variety of matters, from all types of civil rights issues to unionization, stopping the Vietnam War and ending the draft.
It gave birth to a lingering schism on the left between those willing to take to the streets and those who deemed such behavior to be too "radical" and who called its proponents "radicals".
One of the radical ideas of those young radicals was to force a meaningful transfer of power, political, economic, social and all of the rest from entrenched oligarchs and elites to the masses. This goal came to be summarized as "Power to the People", which, sadly, became enough of a mere slogan that its force as an organizing principle was lost.
That goal needs revitalization. In addition, we really need to look to forcing change in the operations of the current economic, political and social machine, the war machine and the rest of the machinery of oppression and control.
I'll let a better rabble rouser than I ever was tell us how
Hats off to Occupy, btw, and our climate marchers and the folks in Ferguson. There are, however, a vast number of gears and levers, some less obvious than others. For starts, as they ask on TV, "what's in your wallet?".