mario savio: berkeley free speech movement (fsm) leader (& one of my heroes)
"There comes 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 on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop." - mario savio (berkeley, california: december 2nd, 1964).
i got to see mario savio in person once. he had reemerged from some seclusion, in 1995, to give another, less-celebrated speech at a protest outside of a hugely-controversial meeting of the university of california board of regents: a meeting where the board abolished the use of affirmative action in admissions & hiring in the u.c. system (a display of utterly arrogant political opportunism by then-california governor pete wilson, & his cronies).
savio pretty much looked the same that day except, at that stage of his life (30 years after this famous fsm footage was shot), his hair was entirely grey, quite long, & pulled back into a pony tail. he was also, at that time, a professor of mathematics & philosophy at the california state university, sonoma (csus).
this fsm milestone, as the wikipedia entry i link to above indicates, was at the height of controversy at the u.c. berkeley campus, as administrators were shockingly attempting to ban students' on-campus political activities.
in some ways, this one moment is like the boston tea-party of the entire student protest movement of the 1960s...
i got to see mario savio in person once. he had reemerged from some seclusion, in 1995, to give another, less-celebrated speech at a protest outside of a hugely-controversial meeting of the university of california board of regents: a meeting where the board abolished the use of affirmative action in admissions & hiring in the u.c. system (a display of utterly arrogant political opportunism by then-california governor pete wilson, & his cronies).
savio pretty much looked the same that day except, at that stage of his life (30 years after this famous fsm footage was shot), his hair was entirely grey, quite long, & pulled back into a pony tail. he was also, at that time, a professor of mathematics & philosophy at the california state university, sonoma (csus).
this fsm milestone, as the wikipedia entry i link to above indicates, was at the height of controversy at the u.c. berkeley campus, as administrators were shockingly attempting to ban students' on-campus political activities.
in some ways, this one moment is like the boston tea-party of the entire student protest movement of the 1960s...
i love 'em : )