PrintAugust 31, 2007
Fencing in the tree-sitters
The college football season begins tomorrow with a home game for UC Berkeley, playing Tennessee in a re-match of last year's opening game in Knoxville. Meanwhile, the tree hugging (literally) protestors outside have been fenced-in for their own protection. They have installed themselves in several trees outside the stadium on the theory that the non-endangered vegetation is somehow sacred, and should not be cut down in order to build new facilities and renovate the stadium (including necessary seismic reinforcement).
The University maintains that the fence is necessary to protect the protestors from the 72,000 fans attending tomorrow's sellout, including many fans of the Vols who have followed their beloved team to Berkeley for the contest. The protestors have asked a judge to order the fence removed.
The sheer brazen chutzpah of these odiferous obstructionists beggars the mind. Check out the photographs of them by Deanne Fitzmaurice of the San Francisco Chronicle. They are trespassers, asking a judge for protection for their law-breaking. They have behaved in a disgusting way, with 155 violations of the law and 98 arrests, even at one point dropping a bag of human feces on a police officer.
Most of the student body at Cal seems to regard them with a mixture of contempt and amazement. Even in the ultra-blue Bay Area, there are a lot of football fans, and Cal is the only local team that is any good. The Raiders and 49ers are entirely unpromising, and Stanford no better. Cal is our shot for football glory this year.
It is long past time for the judiciary to act responsibly and order these contrarians out of the trees and into jail. The university is allowing food to be delivered to them. Maybe that is smart, but I would enjoy the spectacle of them getting very, very hungry.
Update: The Berkeley Daily Planet (published twice weekly, but why worry about accuracy?) thinks the Geneva Conventions apply to protestors in addition to prisoners of war:
The Chronicle ought to be paying the Biweekly Planet to stay in business, just to make it look better."Isn't withholding food and water a violation of one of the Geneva Conventions? Not, of course, that it would matter to an institution which still employs John Yoo, the unapologetic author of the Bush adminstration's torture policy, on its law school faculty."
