Monday, September 28, 1998
All UCLA needs is love of education, life
LOVE: Student body president urges exercise of will, action for
change
Last spring break, I was kicking it at my friend’s house,
watching television. The news was on and I saw a brief image of a
student protest at Berkeley. My stomach and my mouth dropped
simultaneously. In the clamor of my own life, I had distanced
myself from reality – far enough away that the scene on television
shook me with a force not unlike a 7.0 earthquake.
The protest was a student response to the release of Berkeley’s
admission rates – the first class to be "officially affected" by
the implementation of Proposition 209.
Whether or not Proposition 209 had passed, we would still be
seeing the effects of the elimination of affirmative action via the
Regents’ passage of SP-1.
As I sat there, I could barely hear the news anchor report the
story as the thoughts in my head drowned out her voice. I actually
did not want to hear what the results were. It was too much to
bear.
The past year had been a very trying one, to put it mildly. It
had marked my third year in student government, and I had the honor
of serving as the external vice president (EVP). That was very
special to me, as the external vice president office had played a
large role in transforming my consciousness. I had come to college
with great expectations of learning about the world around me – my
high school had trained me to pass my advanced placement tests, but
not to understand the world in any way.
I had nearly given up on my hopes of a stimulating environment,
buzzing about the ways of the world, until I joined the EVP office.
There I found people who spoke about issues with a genuine passion
and desire to change society for the good of all.
We were the first Undergraduate Student Association Council
which had to deal with the burnout that the whole state of
California was dealing with after the November 1996 elections. We
had gone into the year with great hope, but we left it only with
great divisions and disillusionment with people that I had worked
with.
So, by that spring break, I was envisioning my next year at
UCLA, as a peaceful, average student, studying, sitting around with
my friends and graduating. But that news flash, that fateful day
would change my life forever.
I was unable, from that point on to think of anything else. What
would happen to our campus? Would we be running a slate for
government after this torrid year? What role would I play? How
would students and their organizations react?
When I returned to Los Angeles, there was an electricity in the
air I had not felt for nearly a year. I walked onto campus and my
knees buckled from the nervousness and anxiety I felt with each new
realization of the toll this crisis would take on our campus.
We had always known what effect eliminating affirmative action
would have, that’s why we had worked so hard to get the regents to
reject SP-1 and for voters to vote no on Proposition 209. It was
quite a different feeling to look around campus and to know that
beginning next year, nothing would be the same.
After long, emotional conversations with my peers – about our
purpose, the fate of the campus and our communities – and the
trauma we had experienced that year, I was somehow convinced that
we could make it happen. We could change ourselves as much as we
needed to change society.
Last year, I had not only suffered from the pains of campus
politics, but for the first time in my life, my family was falling
apart too. I had an incredibly blessed life, for although my
parents and sisters were very dysfunctional in their own beautiful
way, it was a predictable and constant dysfunction that I knew how
to handle. But that year, our family was in a crisis, which
plummeted me into a near complete shut down. All of these pressures
combined had taken an incredible toll on myself.
On my path to self recovery, I rediscovered the driving force of
life on this planet: love. I had rediscovered what every newborn
child already knows, until they are spoiled by the life-hating
society that people have created: love is truly the answer we must
hold ourselves to in transforming ourselves as individuals in a
collective society.
People often misunderstand love, as our society has manipulated
it into a commodity, like everything else. We listen to "love"
songs, and cheesy movies that have manipulated love into something
like a bar of chocolate; it sure tastes and feels good, but it’ll
make you fat and then you’ll be sorry.
However, in most revolutionary texts, whether it be Che Guevara,
Bell Hooks, Malcolm X or Grace Lee Boggs, you will see that
everyone, at one point, recognizes the role that love plays in
truly transforming our world. In these texts, I discovered that
love is a practice, not just a feeling.
The praxis of love is what is necessary to understand how we can
expand our humanity. Praxis is reflection and action; it is an
examination of our thoughts and actions with love as our guideline.
Love cannot be contained by the false boundaries of
heterosexuality, class, race, gender and ability. How can people
claim to love and in the same breath justify discriminating against
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for loving someone of
the same gender?
Our battle for social and economic justice would be
inconsequential if we did not patiently and persistently challenge
ourselves to behave and interact with love.
That is what had been missing for so long in the "movements" we
had seen on campus. We struggle for access to education because we
love ourselves and our community. We understand that if people are
denied an education, they will suffer economically and spiritually
while the system of domination will only continue.
If our chancellor truly cared about people of color, then he
would challenge himself to uphold justice and equality, not
repression and elitism.
If Ward Connerly truly loved himself then he would see that his
continual attacks on affirmative action, ethnic studies and ethnic
graduations are attacking himself and his existence in this
country. Instead, he has sadly denied himself by claiming
liberation from the "baggage" of his ancestry and has bought into
the cheap freedom that individualism and capitalism offers.
I often talk with people who are so frustrated by their own
inability to conceive of a free and just world that they would
rather live in our current world filled with the inhumanity of
inequality. If we would love ourselves and each other more, we
would stop limiting our freedoms to what we have been taught is
"practical" and "realistic."
If we would love ourselves and each other more, we would
challenge our thinking every day, understanding that the world is
constantly changing around us and that new realities are constantly
forming.
This summer, I have been challenged by my peers with the love
that they have for me and that we hold for each other. Now I may
sound pretty cheesy, but the changes we have seen once we put love
in the center of our paradigm, and not anger or dismay, are truly
remarkable.
Engaging in the praxis of love with my friends, we devoted
ourselves to making drastic changes in the way that student
government worked, the way in which we treated each other and in
how decisions were made. That was the only way we could even
comprehend stepping into the tumult of organizing our campus.
Truly practicing love is one of the hardest things I have
undertaken. I have to remind myself not to be frustrated with the
amount of time it takes to transform who I am and the micro-culture
of student organizing that we have created.
The amount of change we see this year on our campus depends on
the effort and will of every student on this campus to transform
themselves, to think beyond boundaries and to dare to defy
injustice, institutionalized racism and internalized self
hatred.
We then become an example to the world that hope is alive and
that the future can truly become what we have loved it into
being.
Stacy Lee
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