"People's Park" - my first blog post Mar 4, 2010

Candid picture someone took of me in a camera store in Berkeley 1968-9. I was just as spaced & oblivious as I look.

This is taken from an email I wrote this evening to my Scottish penpal (I live in USA):

I'm not into politics either, but I never had to be. I was always happy enough with whatever I had. I guess if I lived in a tiny village that depended on a lake that was bought up by a giant corporation who fenced us out from our only source of water, or if I lived where there was a tyrannical or terrorist government, I would have to get political to survive. But I have never been in a situation like that. The closest I ever came to that was getting chased out of People's Park in 1969, and waking up the next morning to look out my window and see the National Guard lining my street! And I lived in Oakland, and People's Park was in Berkeley! So, they were covering a lot of territory. That day I was glued to the live radio broadcast of the city council meeting which lasted ALL day. But the feeling that it might be a good idea to not leave my house kind of made following that particular news story really fascinating. :) Actually, I did leave my house to greet the national guards and they suggested it would be a good idea if I went back inside. I somehow didn't think it would be wise to argue with them. :) And if I hadn't talked to them I wouldn't have been informed that there was a curfew!

I just realized that I am talking to an equally non-politically minded person, and about a foreign country no less, so I should probably explain, so I looked up "People's Park" in Wikipedia, where I found this:

“The mythology surrounding the park is an important part of local culture. The surrounding South Campus neighborhood was the scene of a major confrontation between student protestors and law enforcement during May 1969…”

OMG, I am so ancient that a week in my life is considered mythical!!

What happened was there was this block of land near the University of CA, Berkeley campus where people began planting flowers and trees and they were making it really beautiful. I wasn't a Berkley student, I had just dropped out of a little art college in Oakland. But I lived a couple of miles from Berkeley and walked or hitchhiked or grabbed the bus (paying high school student fare) to Berkeley almost every day and really loved hanging out in People's Park. Then suddenly one day a swarm of cops descended on the park and threw everybody out, and built a really high fence. I remember thinking at the time that it was the highest fence I had ever seen. I didn't know what was happening or why. In fact, I still don't. It had something to do with who owned the rights to the park, and there were other issues that cops may have had about it attracting drug dealers and criminals, or Reagan just got his panties in a bunch. But there was a bit of starry-eyed, hippy flower child innocence I lost that day and in the following weeks, as I saw protestors climb the fence late at night and plant flowers, which the cops would dig up and destroy in the morning, and the cops shot at protesters and arrested them. It was the closest I had ever come to living in a "war zone" and I was scared. The curfew lasted a few days, and the loss of the park stayed with me always.

Wow. That wasn't at all what I expected to be thinking about tonight. That put me on quite a journey! I've been wanting to start a blog lately, and wondering what would I blog about? Well, I could blog about that kind of crap. :) Wow, that was really interesting. Discovering that my life is a myth is just, wow.

That is the title of my blog! "My life is A Myth." Hahaha!! Cool.