Rage politics – Arm the skater boys

vamo pa G por kay no hay na k hacr

From Slingshot Issue #139: January, 2024 (Special Edition)
By Lola
January 18, 2024

I showed up to People’s Park a day after UC Berkeley had erected their 17-foot wall of shipping containers and deployed what must have been over 100 fully armed cops to stand guard on all of the perimeters. I was with some friends, all of whom happen to be skaters. Some were there for the amassing protest, while others were just stopping by 510 (a skate shop on telegraph) on their way home from work. As the cops stood blankly in rows, tightly clutching their batons, a growing group of protesters began chanting, sharing food, and delivering speeches. I felt uncomfortable, caught spiritually between the mass of kindly activists shouting “whose streets? our streets!” and my friends, who were hanging back and debating snatching juice boxes from the protester’s snack tables and throwing them at the rows of cops.

As keown announced he was going to go talk to a cute girl he saw standing alone in the crowd, I began to wonder about the distinct awkwardness i felt, and why it was so tied to the presence of my friends who, despite their seemingly apolitical behavior, hate cops and love people’s park just as much as anyone else present at the protest that night. What is this cringeyness, or embarrassment, that I so often feel when engaging in certain forms of activism?

I thought about it for the whole drive back to our house in oakland, staring out the window from the freeway overpass, heading back in the direction of our well-rehearsed routines: drinking beer, and doing graffiti, and lighting christmas tree fires in the street, or watching dvds on our old tv from the living room floor. With every cell in my body, I despise the “united states.” The intensity of my burning hatred frequently brings me to tears, or makes me laugh, or fills me up with a kind of warming fire that I think is necessary for my survival. In my heart I’m an anarchist, and i try to be one in my daily life, too. So why can’t i be an anarchist when i’m at the protest? Why can’t the skater boys of the world, who are so ready to steal groceries and start trash can fires and flip off cops in the street, embrace a political identity?

I’m making generalizations here, but I do think this phenomenon —the depoliticization of punk/alt/skater antics (or in other words, the chaos that ensues when people hang out on the streets) — highlights a crucial flaw in our current protest methods. The flaw, put plainly, is that these protest methods are boring. And predictable. If you don’t feel called to chant “whose streets? our streets!” then nothing is going to come from your chant. If you don’t feel called to march down the street holding a cardboard sign, then no good will come from your cardboard sign. On the other hand, what if instead of using protest as a means-to-an-end, you seized the means themselves, acting in accordance with what brings you pleasure, excitement, and peace?

If activists were encouraged to act on impulse, act on rage, I think the benefits would be multifaceted. Not only would we be able to arm the skater boys of the world—by which I mean any and all people who are anarchists at heart, but feel turned off by politics—but we would also see far more successful protests. While I don’t think we should ever measure the success of a protest by what it achieves on paper (the real marker of success, after all, is whether or not you felt liberated) i do think that if we were to disperse, act more chaotically and in tune with our unique desires, the cops would have a much harder time shutting us down.

Of course, there’s a lot of work to do, and not all of it is going to be fun or easy. Fighting against the state requires more than the relatively simple act of confrontational combat — there’s also all the internalized messages we have to work through and help our loved ones work through, painfully, slowly. With an abundance of thought and care. And yet, with that said, I don’t think we should ever get to a place where we view protest as a chore, or an embarrassment, or something you don’t want your friends to catch you doing. Protest should be an extension of yourself in the same way your artwork is an extension of yourself. Beauty that we can’t help but create in the face of all the worst the world has to offer us.

And it goes without saying that dismantling the state is going to take more than throwing juice boxes. But as my favorite anarchist, Pat the Bunny, once put it: “i know there’s not enough windows on this planet to break us free…but maybe one will be just enough for some dignity.”

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Also in the issue:

Overheard on the Street

Ever since the wall went up, everyone’s been offering ideas for knocking it down or getting over the top. Here’s a few ideas we’ve heard.

• We heard that some Burning Man artists already built a giant Trojan Horse Sculpture on top of a bulldozer for a recent burn and that it is stored at some industrial land in Richmond. During the upcoming Leap Day Action night protest (Feb. 29), we heard they’re going to bring it to Berkeley and drive it through the big metal gates of the wall!

• Someone said that what’s really going to happen is that on Earth Day, everyone’s going to bring buckets of compost and mulch to an event in downtown Berkeley, but then at the last moment they’ll all make their way to the Park, dump the buckets and form a big hill on Bowditch Street — Big enough to build a bigskateboard ramp and a slide.

• We heard that someone has figured out where all the rented security guards get their jackets and they’re going to bring a truckload to Berkeley — then at the Mardi Gras, everyone’s going to change into the jackets and rush the Park gates. The real security guards won’t be able to figure out what is going on and they’ll think it’s the relief shift so they’ll abandon their posts. Then people carrying guitar cases and other instrument cases seemingly on their way to a gig will unpack plasma torches, and cut through the fucking shipping container walls.

• Another comrade claims that stilt walkers from the Shen Yun performance group will suddenly appear at the BART station and use extra tall stilts to make it over the wall. Or perhaps they’ll be pole vaulters?

• Then there’s the tunnel-proponents — they’ve suggested it would be easy to tunnel under the wall. The police will have to check under all the floors of buildings within a block of the Park to stop them.

• The Lake Anza surfing term has suggested hiding a ladder cut up into pieces in their boards so they can get close without being detected — then snapping it back together and climbing over.

• There’s a lot of talk about creating distractions, disguises, pranks — dog walking parades, performance artists.

• Some people want to put LSD in the water, but others don’t want to waste perfectly good LSD on a bunch of Berkeley-bourgeois-uptight-squares!

• Someone else said that a volcano is going to erupt in the middle of the Park and melt the wall.

• On a more serious note, many people are plotting to occupy a number of important university buildings as a diversionary tactic. UC will have to bring police to dismantle the occupations, and then we’ll make our move to storm the gates. Or another version of this rumor is that we’ll trade the UC buildings hostage-style in exchange for the Park.

UC has said they will defend the wall 24/7 … forever? There’s cameras and lights and what look like loud speakers?

Will the wall be the only place in the Bay Area without graffiti or vandalism? It’s ironic that while UC students’ bikes are getting stolen, while people are getting mugged, while cars are getting broken into — the police can’t help — but there will always be enough police for the wall.

Has anyone ever attempted to build a $312 million building under armed guard? Will they send police to guard the cement trucks and the porta-potties? Will they do background checks for every subcontractor, every laborer, every delivery driver before they let them on the construction site? If the site ever becomes a dorm, is UC prepared to post armed guards around the perimeter 24/7 forever?

There are 7 Comments

Walls can be flown over, smashed down, or tunneled under. These cops are nowhere near as powerful as the IOF, and their walls nowhere near as strong as the Apartheid Wall. Hell these cops would probably run from toy store drones.

as someone who ate many a BongaBurger and food not bombs plate at the Park I love to see the rebelliousness in this article. good to see slingshot still going. it's a fucking shame what they've done to the park.

I think you should get your skater friends together and go cause some chaos, personally I'd do that somewhere other than where the cops are amassed, seems like a perfect opportunity to me.

I'm not super familiar with the situation with people's park, but it seems like it would be easier to make a new park than it would be to take this one back from the cops, or even better, make several new parks.

If you’re not familiar with the park, read this Slingshot issue online. It’s got a lot of context, and a long history of resistance to various authorities’ attempted takeovers of the park.

i love this! i was one of these kids for years and years. Reading groups have helped me bridge some of the tensions youre talking about. Just reading a zine together and talking about it with friends. Also sobriety has been super helpful but theres no way I would have listened to anyone saying that to me so i dont expect to be listened to either. take care of each other and continue to be dangerous together! Stay up!

the cringe won't ever go away. every time there's a large gathering, liberal activist dorks will try to set the tone

all you can do is drown them out with something better

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