It’s the time of year when the word “Tele-BEARS” is heard again, when dorm-dwellers try to calculate exactly how many bags of peanuts they can buy with their excess meal points, and when textbooks that have never been touched are glanced at with trepidation as their owners think that maybe it’s time to take a look inside. Spring is here at Cal, and the year is almost over. In a tribute to procrastination, and in an attempt to avoid reading my own textbooks, I want to try to put a little perspective on a few events that have defined the year.
The year started off with a bang when the Berkeley College Republicans and the California Patriot brought author Michelle Malkin to campus to speak about her book, In Defense of Internment. Berkeley liberals, those staunch defenders of free speech, tried to shut down the event by protesting and pushing their way into the auditorium, though some of them were understandably confused to find out that the supposedly racist and anti-Asian speaker they sought to silence was actually an Asian woman.
Malkin was not the only celebrity speaker who came to campus; others included Howard Dean, who predictably enough turned a celebration of the Free Speech Movement into an anti-Bush rally, and former Vice President Al Gore, who spoke about climate change. Efforts to find someone who cared have thus far been unsuccessful.
But there were really two things that caught every Berkeley student’s attention during the first semester. One of these was the presidential election. Almost everyone had an opinion, and it was nearly impossible to walk through Sproul without having ten different people from ten different groups ask if you had registered to vote yet. And the activism went beyond the campus. The Berkeley College Republicans spent several weekends down in Monterey walking precincts for state Senate candidate Abel Maldonado, who emerged from his race victorious. The Cal Berkeley Democrats spent the last few days before the election in Nevada, trying to swing it for Kerry. Despite their efforts, Bush prevailed in that state, on his way to collecting the most votes ever nationwide and becoming the first candidate to win a majority of popular votes since 1988.
The other universal attention grabber, and quite possibly the only thing better than Bush’s re-election, was the stellar season enjoyed by our own Cal Golden Bear football team. Only three years after a dismal 1–10 record, the Bears, led by Heisman candidates Aaron Rodgers and J.J. Arrington, tore through the Pac-10. Our only loss was to the top-ranked USC Trojans, and even that game was ten yards away from a Cal victory. Weeks later, when the Big Game ended and we rushed the field, having vanquished Stanford for the third year in a row, it seemed like making the Rose Bowl was a certainty. Yet the BCS, in its infinite (lack of) wisdom, sent Texas to the Rose Bowl and Cal to the Holiday Bowl. After a divisive election season, the Berkeley student body was united by sheer disdain for the BCS.
While we’re on the subject of sports, the triumph of the Boston Red Sox in the World Series has to be mentioned. It was a day we baseball fans under the age of 86 thought we’d never see, the day when the Curse of the Bambino was finally broken. Not only did the Red Sox win the World Series for the first time since Ronald Reagan was seven years old, but they also became the first baseball team in history to come back from a 3–0 deficit in a seven-game series. For baseball fans everywhere it was vindication on a cosmic scale.
Back in Berkeley, with ASUC elections approaching, politics once again took center stage. The ASUC Senate confirmed a qualified student to the Judicial Council, before doing an about-face and trying to revoke her confirmation when they discovered she was a conservative and a contributor to the Patriot. Failing to remove her, they turned their wrath on the military recruiters on campus and passed a resolution urging the university to kick the recruiters off campus, ostensibly because the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is discriminatory. This is an effort that is ongoing, and one that conservatives will continue to fight against.
There will be more battles, more symbolic resolutions, and more spurious impeachment proceedings. There will be more sports successes, more Tedford, and hopefully a little bit less of a role for the BCS. There will be protests and counter-protests. The 2004–05 year may be ending, but in three months we’ll all be back, ready to give it another go. And the California Patriot will be here every step of the way, reporting on what you need to know and searching for the truth in this bastion of liberal confusion. That’s just what we do. If we didn’t, we’d have nothing to do but study — and who would want to do that?
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