As fall semester settles in, I’m back to my Tuesday/Thursday stroll along the south side of the UC Berkeley campus. My route takes me due east along Channing, starting just west of Telegraph, up to Bowditch where I make a hard right and continue on until Bowditch ends at Dwight Way. Twenty paces leftwards on Dwight and I enter the archway to the inner courtyard of the American Baptist Seminary of the West, a near-defunct institution that is keeping itself alive by leasing out its real estate to other programs. Cal’s Fall Program for Freshmen—a sizeable operation that provides a full freshman-level fall semester to incoming Cal students who have been given deferred admission for spring semester—accounts for a good half of the ABSW campus these days, bringing a bright energetic vibe to an otherwise moribund place. I have been FPF faculty for 23 years now.
Depending on how well you know the street layout of the area to the immediate south of the UCB campus, you may recognize that my path takes me along the eastern end of People’s Park, a two-block expanse of trees and greensward bounded by Telegraph to the west, Haste to the north, Bowditch to the east, and Dwight Way to the south. People’s Park should be a fragrant oasis within Berkeley’s pleasant surroundings, but despite its towering trees and grassy lawns, People’s Park is a no-fly zone, a patch of sorry urban blight within a bucolic college-town setting. Perhaps at one point People’s Park sported a certain optimistic vibe, providing as it did a handy hangout and camp site for tie-dyed hippies, flower children, wanderers, and radical-wannabees. They could pitch a tent or stretch out a hammock in People’s Park without fear of police intrusion: how very Berkeley.
Over time, the appealing but naïve Utopianism of 1960s People’s Park has given way to a grittier reality. People’s Park itself persists more or less unchanged from its Summer of Love incarnation, but nowadays its habitués are a motley assortment of pestiferous druggies, winos, panhandlers, and raving lunatics. Once a glen that shimmered gently to the light thrum of hippie guitars, its air flavored with patchouli and wafts of marijuana, People’s Park is now Skid Row with petunias, its miasma of decay and wretchedness drifting westwards to stifle Telegraph Avenue, once a delectably goofy thoroughfare but now a foreboding stretch of burned out buildings, closed store fronts, and obnoxious lowlife.
While People’s Park has devolved, UC Berkeley has flourished and strides forward confidently into a brilliant 21st century. New student residences are popping up all over the south side of the campus, with the handsome new Anna Head complex (near the north border of People’s Park) as the most recent manifestation of Cal’s ongoing vitality. The upshot is a constant bustle of students trotting along the sidewalks around the borders of People’s Park, a situation that provides one of the most glaring contrasts between human populations imaginable. For anyone who still holds an image of Cal as a hotbed for grubby radical types, be advised that today’s UCB is an awe-inspiring assemblage of scrubbed, shiny, cleanly-dressed, and altogether gorgeous young people. Go-getters and over-achievers, they zoom around in a buzz of books, laptops, text messages, cell ringtones, and busy chatter about meetings and classes and projects and teachers and friends and family. Just being in their general vicinity is like having a double espresso.
Thus: On the sidewalks, America’s fondest dreams for its future. In the Park: America’s nightmare of that future gone wrong. The two co-exist within just a few feet of each other; matter and anti-matter, both scrupulously avoiding contact. The Cal students are there because they’re supposed to be there: it’s their right and proper place at this point in their lives. But what about the bums? Why are they there?
Barring bonafide and untreated mental illness, most of the Park denizens have put themselves there. The sociologists have their theories as to why, the psychologists theirs. But I wonder. Any theory that seeks to explain away personal accountability is suspect in my mind. We make decisions, and decisions have consequences. We have free will. Could it come down to something really very simple, something perfectly expressed by an eloquent phrase that has fallen foul of the political-correctness police?
The phrase: lack of character. Its antonym: strength of character. For generations, to be accused of a “lack of character” was tantamount to being condemned as worthless. It means far more than being a wimp, a weenie, or a wutz. It zeros in on a person’s ethical core and implies full accountability for failure; no blaming it on poor diet or bad luck or childhood abuse or chlorinated water. A lack of character is your fault. A lack of character is something that can be and must be corrected. A chap might be a gutless wonder, a marshmallow, or a Miniver Cheevy, and still retain a semblance of social standing. But a lack of character is an E-ticket ride to outcaste status and a spot on the grass of People’s Park.
Maybe the do-gooders are right. Maybe the term should be left to molder away. Maybe it’s just too redolent of Victorian rectitude, class prejudice, stiff-upper-lip rigidity, and boarding-school brutality. But maybe not. The Victorians were a lot of things, but they weren’t enablers. The same is true of Americans, at least until recently when watery excuses come burbling up about even the most trifling shortcomings. What happened to that fabled American spirit of self-reliance and personal integrity? All in all I’m staunchly in favor of retaining lack of character for its clarity and precision. It teems with connotations of dismissal, disdain, and disgust, just as it should.
As I was walking along the sidewalk bordering People’s Park, I noticed a thirty-something fellow who was sprawled in his grubby sleeping bag near the border. Our eyes met briefly. It was an edgy moment, intensified by height since I was looking down at him. I’m on my way to teach a class of these marvelous young people, I thought. I have a lot to offer them, not only as to the subject I teach, but also as a role model of a fulfilled and successful professional. You, on the other hand, have only one thing to teach them: you are the grim reminder of what could happen if they ever allow their strength to wither into lack.
I walked on to my class. He probably went back to sleep.