Liber und liber

It's rare to say right or left wing here, mostly people are categorised as liberal or conservative, and The Bay Area (San Francisco and its environs) is the liberal capital of America. I don't need to tell the history - the beat poets, the acid waves, the student riots, the gay culture, and so on - it is the history of our time, the time of freedom.

People here care passionately about liberal values - I was at the physio the other day to try and get some exercises for my back, and the first conversation she struck up whilst investigating the inner workig of my spine was about healthcare and climate change. It took me aback a bit, politics is not even for the dinner table let alone the doctors office.

It's not just the residents though - you have to consider the type of people that Berkeley attracts (yes, including me). A short anecdote should illustrate this: one sunny Sunday I went to sit outside and have brunch. I joined a table of people, most of whom I had met before, and all of whom were continental European (tight jeans, nice scarfs, crossed legs, etc.). It emerged that they were talking about 9/11. Fully 5 out of 7 people there thought that there was more to it than just Al Qaeda, with various reasons (I was not one of the 6). There was a political science student who said that it was come up with in a think tank. There was an architecture student whose professor had said that they couldn't believe that the buildings would have collapsed in the way they did without explosives. Some thought that Bush was involved, others not. Thankfully another statistician arrived after a few minutes and started to back up my argument that the probability of everyone involved keeping it secret was almost zero. Anyway, that tells you what we're dealing with here.

The university campus is open to the public because it is in effect owned by the public. This means that on the main 'street' you get lots of crazy preachers rabbiting on about loads of shit, and this definitely includes anti-capitalist nutjobs. What makes them so crazy is that everyone only every hears one or two sentences of their two hour shpeil. They are not, however, as crazy as this guy, who I am yet to see in real life but apparently he is there pretty regularly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J94_C-8Q9ao

There was the LoveFest yesterday, which rammed home this liberal thing - a dance music party in the middle of the city, in front of the civic centre, with tens of thousands of people and twenty different stages. Huge volumes of extacy and lots of nudity. Imagine the notting hill carnival but in trafalgar square and better music. That makes it sound like London is as liberal as here for allowing the carnival, but the attitude here is different - it feels like the city supports it, wants it, loves it. There were no policemen inside, and when the queue at the gates got too busy, they started letting people in for free. The atmosphere was, as the name suggests, full of love (the actual name was Lovelution, but I prefer the original name).

I am yet to visit Haight-Ashbury, but it has definitely left its mark - there is no taboo to start talking about psychedelics with the locals, they seem to be part of the fabric of growing up here.

One last thing - the student body is still very active. Last week, in protest to recent fee increases and funding cuts, thousands of students marched through campus and tried to get the governing powers to reconsider their approach to higher education - the claim being that the ideals of public education were being destroyed. They were not alone, most of the faculty and university staff went on strike as well, and very few classes took place. The whole university became connected, and for one day everyone was talking about the same thing - how to save the University of California. This may effect me too... watch this space.

Well done if you made it to the end of this, next time it'll be more fun, I'm gonna do some visual media hits.

Keep on truckin'

x