Can you imagine complaining about going to Berkeley for $10,000 a year?

…or so saith the comment I just read in a forwarded email.

I have been reading similar comments all day, in between my visits to campus today. UCLA has been in an uproar– albeit a carefully orchestrated, mostly polite uproar– for a few days now.

The comment was made regarding the protests at Berkeley and UCLA and across the entire UC system over the 32% tuition hike that was voted on today at UCLA by the UC Regents. It raises the cost of schooling to $10,320 by Fall 2009.  I read both the LA times and the New York Times articles about it, and many of the comments.  While most people got the impact of these decisions, quite a few others made comments like the one cited in my title. Sigh. Let me spell out WHY people should complain about going to Berkeley for 10,000 dollars a year.

(1) First of all, it isn’t 10,000 dollars a year. It’s more like 30,000 dollars a year. Los Angeles and San Francisco have some of the highest rents in the nation. California charges more taxes (I think) that anybody else in the world (ok, maybe that is an exaggeration, but it seems pretty damn close). In LA, sales tax alone is over nine percent. It’s an expensive place to go to school. Also outrageously expensive are things like textbooks, lab supplies, health insurance fees, and the occasional night out on the town. So when you are a student, working some 15 to 20 hours a week (which is a lot), making some 6 or 7 dollars an hour, a 32% hike is a LOT of money. That’s rent for three months. Or texbooks  and lab supplies and the occasional flight home to see your parents for two years.

(2) The hike happened MID-YEAR. So students who applied to get into UCLA for this year had noooo idea that their tuition would drastically and dramatically change between Fall and Winter quarter.  Clearly, as the State of California is unable to balance her own budget, they could give a rat’s behind about the ability of anyone else to balance theirs. Way to have some foresight.

(3) Perhaps most importantly, this is part of the slow dismantling of the public sphere of the United States. Like parks, libraries, and the notion of the common good, the idea that we have public institutions, and spaces and places, that we all take care of for each other, is being buried under the most recent Walmart superstore. (I do gotta admit here that I am a sucka for that superstore. Good lord, it’s like a whole woooorld in those places. You never, ever, have to leave.) We are privatized. and the fact that we barely flinch in the face of grand gestures of privitization is some kind of indicator that we have become desensitized to the kind of America in which we once believed.

(4) The dismantling of the idea of equality along racial and socio-economic lines and the corresponding Horatio Alger dream of upward mobility.  The middle class is disappearing, and with it, our public schools.  $10, 320 dollars is a lot of money for the lower classes, who, by the way, are mostly Black and Latino. Inexpensive, excellent education through public universities is one of the few ways that the classes in the United States can still encounter each other, divided as we are geographically and in our labor. In other words, at a place like UCLA,  the children of a maquiladora worker and a Beverly Hills lawyer might sit next to each other in class.  They might have a conversation, and get to know about each other’s lives. In a city where the wealthiest and the poorest residents, mostly divided along racial lines, never have to intersect, and never have to learn how they share the same kind of humanity.  The way the new system is going, the child of the maquiladora worker will now only be able to afford a community college–if any higher education at all. This means waiting lists for classes, the possibility of having to take a class in the middle of the night (I kid you not– check the link), and a degree that means the class divisions of our society are guaranteed to be reproduced.

I’m not sure what the outcome of this will be. But I am worried, very worried. A generation without hope and failed promises is a desperate generation. Sometimes I look around me and for a moment, I feel as if I have caught a whiff of another world, of decadence in decline, of those eras bygone that tumbled down from their great projects and have had to relearn what really matters.

Living with other people

After three years of living alone, I moved in with a family of five.  Living in their guesthouse was to be a temporary solution, until I slowly found myself falling in love. They were a fascinating cast of characters.  There was the father, a monosyllabic warm-hearted man, the wife, a Auntie-Mame style college professor, the teenage daughter, a giggling whirlwind, the teenaged son– the teasing younger brother I never had, and the ’surprise child’, a zoomy seven year old who fancied himself Harry Potter.  They came replete with warm house centered around the kitchen and lengthy dinners, a doe-eyed black lab, and a swimming pool.  And best of all, they seemed to love me back.  I was in heaven. 

Until I wasn’t. Somewhere around the three month mark… it changed. The kids went back to school, the wife got busy, and the husband had a family tragedy… and suddenly I was superfluous and perhaps even a touch…in the way. 

At first I was a little hurt.  I had had such a crush on my family.  They were intriguing; at times a whole huge personality woven together, at others wild, individual variations on the same theme.  Getting to know them– their social organization and cultural practices– was like watching a huge magnolia unfurling in front of my eyes, and then slowly closing up… tightening in to hunker down for the winter months. But, despite my hurt, I knew that it was fine.  I am a grown woman and need a grown woman’s apartment, and knew that quite simply, this is what it means to live with other people. 

We live with so many other people. Some of them are in our homes. Some of them waft by us on the street, some are memories, some are strangers.  Other people we take into the intricacies of our person.  Sometimes we don’t know that they are curling up in our hearts and we become startled by their presence.  Others, well, we work hard with them.  Others are like a great pair of shoes that pinch when we put them on, but we wear them.  We bought them afterall. 

Living with other people is a myriad of experiences.  On the one hand, the people in our lives are always distant to us.  The person I know best in this world is my mother.  I have known her for exactly 32 years and nine months and ten days.  Yet, she is still a mystery to me.  She had this whole other life before she brought me in to the world… a life in which she cried, and loved, and dreamed, and never knew that we would be unalterably each others.  On the other hand, the people in our lives can be closer than we want them to be.  They hold up magnifying glasses to our neuroses and idiosyncracies and push us to be different—when we just want to be left alone.  And so we vascillate on this continuum of intimacy and distance, sometimes drawing close to each other, sometimes pushing the people in our lives away. 

When I lived in New York I constantly marveled at the strange beast that was the city subway.  Of course it is a feat of technology and of course an incredible transport system. But more than that, the NYC subway system is the greatest multicultural democratic project in the entire world.  Forget Obama’s White House, this is the real deal. You see the whole world on the NYC subway. Drunks puking, Wall Street financiers, gaping tourist, Chinese schoolchildren, hip hop kids from the Bronx.  But even stranger than the visual and cultural array of such an assortment of people in one place was the issue of proximity.  I would sit on the subway for hours during my commute each day and think– all we are are just bodies in a moving tin box. Why don’t we talk about the questions at the bottoms of our hearts? Why can’t I just reach across the aisle and take your hand?

Look at us… look around at these people who we live with. What do we mean to one another?

And so, I have made peace with leaving my new family.  Like many romantic relationships, it didn’t survive the three month cut off mark. When the chips fell, we weren’t going to move across that continuum from distance to intimacy. And that is ok. Because it is a unwieldy continuum that we spend our lives trying to navigate. We move close and then away, and then close and then away– sometimes with the same one person over our entire lives. All of us, world roommates, trying to look at each other’s unfurled hearts… all of us, trying to figure out what that means.

Looking: How we respond to the suffering of others

I haven’t posted in a while, but have been getting amazing responses to this blog lately. Thank you so much, dear readers, for sharing your thoughts with me! Anyway, I have been feeling a little anxious about updating but am overwhelmed with writing my dissertation proposal. An amazing mentor and writing buddy of mine, Mike Rose, suggested excerpting some older material.  This is an excerpt from an article that I have recently submitted for publication on how we look at photographs of refugees and what our looking tells us about the nature of suffering.