Mon 14 Nov: sunset, apricot & cornflower skies to the northeast
First day of the UAW strike. Pulled the Judgment card this morning: rebirth, renewal, resurrection. At the picket, hundreds of people strode in long ellipses at different entrances to campus and chanted various things. What’s disgusting? Union busting! What’s outrageous? Poverty wages!
I brought a book to read and held a sign and spent some time sitting reading. There are significant differences between a union-backed strike and a wildcat just as there are between a picket at Berkeley and one at Santa Cruz. It’s nicer to be there with folks you know. I’m not particularly extroverted and chatting up people already in groups can be intimidating. As I leave winter and enter the ‘spring’ of my month, I may find it easier to break in, or not mind flying solo.
I miss my cohort and the wildcat picket. The more you can make it feel like a festival, the better. There was music, food, dancing, screenprinting, ‘teach-ins’ being held under trees. There were faculty and undergrads out there with us. Of course, there were also battalions of cops. No cops today at the union strike, nor faculty nor undergrad support. I get a funny feeling this time, since the university and the union have an agreement about ‘letting us do this’ that was, of course, off the table when SC went rogue and broke contract to do the wildcat. The sense of mutuality, of ‘allowing,’ makes it feel mediated, even artificial. The UAW signs are cookie-cutter printed on machines, unlike our homemade hand-painted wildcat signs and their flourishes of viciousness. But none of these subjective-affective quasi-nostalgic finer points matter if we get demands met.
The teabag for my girl-with-a-stomachache blend says The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace. On the way to the subway I realized I must have dropped my union card, and so we doubled back; J found it blown into the bushes across from Haas Pavilion. The creek flowed with a good amount of rainwater. UPB is closed down, and you walk through its darkened ex-bookstore to use their restroom when you patronize the cafe next door. The same poster for a Ruth Asawa exhibition at the de Young is taped up behind the toilet as has been since 2006. The same bronze-looking bust of Beethoven scowls at the customers in the cafe next door. I don’t judge that part of myself anymore that is relieved when some things stay the same.Â
