Dissent in San Diego, Thankfully

I'm trying to be a good San Diego cheerleader, but it seems like since I've taken that position the planets have aligned to challenge me. First of all I'm perpetually meeting UCSD students (mostly graduate students) who say they dislike San Diego, but then if you ask them anything about San Diego, anything about any of the local communities, they don't know what your talking about. South Park? What is South Park? I just don't want to hear people complain about San Diego when they never leave La Jolla. Come on. It's really a drag because if those people would get engaged in the community they could have a really positive impact.

Then I've been disappointed lately by the local NPR KPBS station 'news' broadcasts. It just seems they've been so middle of the road, and in some cases really uninsightful. It seems they've changed their format lately and are now doing more short sound bites where they say things like 'The War in Iraq Continues', and I think 'Wow, how profound !'. That is news these days? It's hard for me to criticize them, because I've listened for so many years and been a huge supporter, but something has changed for the worse. As a side-note, I was recently being considered for a 'Citizen Journalist' position with them, but I think I asked too many questions about their motivations in the interview, and I did not get the job. Something about the whole thing really turned me off. I think it is partially the idea that the media can not represent a variety of diverse and apposing positions all by themselves, they have to hire 'citizens' to give their 'opinions' hence making KPBS less responsible and less culpable for 'news', that could, I suspect, anger their 'moderate' and 'conservative' contributors. I feel like this is representative of something that is happening in a lot of American institutions...passing the buck, so to speak.

The recent San Diego CityBeat article about the crack down on free speech at UCSD illustrates my point. Here is a link to the article Putting dissent in its Place. I was surprised to discover that Scott Boehm, who I talk with on a some what regular basis was mentioned in this article, as one of the TAs who was fired. I was amazed by that because a day earlier I randomly met Jaun Ruiz, one of the protesters from the NoBordersCamp event who was arrested and now faces deportation. Here is a link to the NoBordersCamp site which features a picture of Juan and info about the charges against him, NoBordersCamp.org.Juan is this amazing, smart and pleasant 21-year-old guy who might be sent back to Colombia, where he has no immediate family or friends, because he bumped into a border patrol agent, and was subsequently thrown to the ground and jumped on by about six of them. Meeting Juan and knowing Scott, personalized this issue for me in a way I was not expecting, but I'm glad it did.

There are challenges in this town, more then I've mentioned here, but they're representative of challenges in the world, so I think we might as well face it and figure out how to deal with it. We could all move to places that are more comfortable, more in line with our ideology, but that is living in denial. Let's not do that, let's call it like we see it and claim the place we are in. That is called living responsibly.