Code Pink
On a recent trip to Berkeley Jan and I had a chance to meet some members of an anti-war group called Code Pink as two of them protested outside the US Marine Corps office. We talked with them for a while and watched them protest by singing what I would call anti-military parody songs karaoke-style as one of them swung a large hoola hoop around her waist.
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show recently featured this video report on the Code Pink initiative in Berkeley.
We found the Code Pink women to be sincere and personable, but alone. Their exercise of free speech was protected by two Berkeley police officers (one for each protester, I guess) but with no other participants or audience, except Janet and me. I’m sure there are more people there at other times, but not on that day.
In our dialogue with them, we felt an echo of the Berkeley of old, the bastion of alternative lifestyles, social ferment and radical politics.
While a lot of that DNA is still present in the community, it seems remarkably inconspicuous on an average day walking the streets. My sense is that the student population, while very diverse, seems more conservative in some ways than the older residents of the city who have roots in the 60s and 70s.
Of course, all of our conclusions about Berkeley are still very preliminary. The campus and community are complex entities with many faces. At least part of our learning process is the reversal of expectations. I suppose a lot of that is necessary before real understanding begins to grow.
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Earl Creps—a popular speaker and leader—is director of the Doctor of Ministry program and associate professor at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary (AGTS) in Springfield, Missouri. He has been a pastor, ministries consultant, and university professor. Along the way, Creps earned a Ph.D. in communication at Northwestern University and a doctor of ministry degree in leadership at AGTS.
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I can’t help be see a parallel of the Code Pink protesters to a lot of the more public efforts of the Church, particularly the American evangelicals and pentecostals.
Anti-abortion prayer ralleys? Street preaching? How often are our efforts doing absolutely nothing at all? *
( * Of course, there’s always the typical Church disclaimer in defense of these sort of activities: You never know who will be touched by God, if just one person changes their mind, prayer is never time wasted, etc. I’m just not sure that these are the best investments of our time and energy… )
Earl,
Contrary to what the rest of the country may assume, students at Cal have been more conservative than the residents of the City, for a long time. I went to Cal in 1979, and people in the area already were complaining that Cal’s students had sold out, lost their idealism and (I suspect more importantly) their activism.
There were some demonstrations in 1980, when Reagan was elected—broke a few windows. As near as I could tell from the news and rumors on campus, that was overwhelmingly city residents, not students.
I think that you’ll find, like other college towns that I’ve known, that the student body and the permanent residents are two very different populations. What is unusual about Berkeley, is that the students are often the more conservative group.