My first revolutionary was Mario Savio. I was fifteen, it was 1977,
and we met in a book that was lying around the house I grew up in in
Houston.
[I met all my revolutionaries in books, which might hint that I’ve
never been arrested.] [Never.]
Mario was dark and handsome and a leader of Berkeley’s FSM, or Free
Speech Movement. A bright son of Italian immigrants, his first arrest was at a
1964 protest against the San Francisco Hotel Association, which only hired
blacks for menial jobs. He spent that summer in the south registering black
voters and returned to learn that his university was banning political speech
on campus. It seems hard to believe now—or maybe not. (Though I’m not one to
believe that trigger warnings are another kind of ban, they did come to mind.)
Anyway. On one December afternoon in 1964, Savio found himself in the
middle of a protest about this speech ban, the ouster of a few students, and
the disbanding of a few groups. So, after considerately imploring his listeners
not to harass the union workers then painting the administration building and
not joining their strike, he jumped on to a car and made a speech,
a speech printed in that book in my mother’s house in 1977, a
speech now featured on AP history tests. Today I found his words spliced into a Linkin Park song called
“Wretches and Kings,” and some Bernie-or-busters are enjoying the video of the speech
that’s here on YouTube, with a Marxist analogy that all can
understand, claiming Berkeley’s board were the factory managers, its faculty
were the employees, and the students were the raw materials being processed. Savio
knew that no student wants to turn into a product, and he said so beautifully
from the top of a car:
There is a time when the operation of
the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take
part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all!
How can a sixteen year
old gal not love a guy like that? I love him still. This semester, I assigned
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a text in a freshman comp class and saw what
I’d never quite realized. You’ll see it for yourself:
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction
of the machine of government, let it go...perchance it will wear smooth -
certainly the machine will wear out... If it is of such a nature that it
requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the
law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
I guess Savio had
been flipping through his Thoreau that semester.
Mario
Savio ended up as a university “lecturer”—basically an adjunct, like me, and
died at 53 in 1996.
