Berkeley is infamous for its difficulty grasping reality. Whether it’s mistaking trees for houses or mistaking illegal immigrants for in-state students, this area has given rise to all sorts of cockamamie ideas.
Now, the university thinks it can make People’s Park a nice setting for normal people to enjoy an afternoon. The university hired a consultant to come up with all sorts of lofty plans, but — as we explain in our editorial on Page 4 — such plans are useless if the homeless encampment remains in the park. If the university doesn’t wake up to this reality, it will never make anything useful of that monument to 1960s Berkeley student radicalism.
On Page 26, Alex Marlow treats us to a heap of present-day Berkeley radicalism. Yet the people speaking at the event in question, making outrageous claims, were not radical students. They were Cal professors, and they did a pathetic job of rallying younger folks to their cause. This is a phenomenon that is near and dear to my heart, as I appeared on a local cable interview show a few months ago to talk about how the students at Cal are not militant anymore.
One thing that the student body does seem to be very geared up about is the presidential election. This is quite evident from a walk through Sproul Plaza — one sees the Ron Paul table and the sickening Hillary Clinton table. That’s why, with the California primary in a few days, we decided to air some of our views on the presidential candidates. On Page 20, you’ll get my take on which of the GOP candidates can claim to be conservative. On Page 23, Ben Chapman and Max Landaw explain their distaste for Paul, and you’ll find two opposing views on Mike Huckabee on Pages 24 and 25.
When you vote for president, remember that there are also some very important state propositions on the ballot. To help you make sense of them, we’ve included a Patriot’s voter guide on Pages 16, 17, and 18.
This will be an exciting year for elections, since we’ll have two more after this one — and, really, what better way is there to demonstrate our political beliefs? We don’t need to seize People’s Park. Being pelted with tear-gas canisters doesn’t prove anything. It’s the old Berkeley way, the way fondly remembered by anyone in town with gray hair.
Finally, take pride in exercising your right to vote — and in the fact that you can actually remember to go vote, as opposed to most of the vagrants in People’s Park, who will be stuck in a drug-induced haze on February 5.
Your compatriot,
Alisa Farenzena
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