I am seated at Berkeley Bowl cafe. I believe that you could walk in here with a spiked dog collar around your neck and a leash dangling from it and still be quite radical. Or a hawk-mo. Or a fresh facial wound. There was a time when some young people dressed like nuts. It could be shocking. It actually seems amazingly easy to be shocking now. Unless you’re homeless because that kind of radical living shocks nobody now. 

 I dropped my son off at his private progressive elementary school in Berkeley. It was art day. There was kids art in all the rooms. It was all full of progressive ideas i.e. Trite and boring. Everyone was copying each other. Except when they weren’t. Like when they made clay masks but there was that one blobby mask with no eyes and no mouth and not face. Or when there where the portraits with flowers and birds, except that one with son many extra eyes and such sharp weird teeth. My sons bird sculpture in clay was all blotchy and looked like a pterodactyl. He mixed every color together for the glaze. It was not cute, and I was so proud of him. That little Freak!

I walked to my car and nearly every house, I kid you not, had “free” things to give away to passers by. Basically crap, that the homeowners ( of what are now million dollar 900 sq foot cottages) feel are useful their community. Like worn down toe shoes. An Afro comb. A tiny microwave that’s like $30 at Walmart. And 2 biographies of Charles Barkley. Now those Kind of struck me funny … And oddly radical. How different! Read Charles Barkley biographies. Woah. People do that! I feel encouraged. I like diversity. And Good for them too. 

Resist!