Occupied again: Tents back up on UCD quad
At about 8 p.m. on the Quad, work continued on a geodesic dome alongside about 40 tents in a new Occupy UC Davis encampment.
“I need one person to inventory all the bolts that we have,” said one man, doing his best to guide the process.
“We don’t want any leftover nuts,” someone added.
It got a few laughs.
The thousands of people from the midday general assembly had dwindled to a few dozen, and the number of satellite trucks had dropped to four, but a quietly festive atmosphere remained.
Someone strummed a guitar. People huddled around the pale light of laptops.
“This is amazing,” said Thomas Matzat, who suffered nerve damage when he was one of 10 arrested for misdemeanors when 35 helmeted campus cops came to clear their first camp on Friday.
“The amount of support and community has really been bolstered because of this incident. Not saying it was a good thing, but it’s had positive outcomes.”
Standing with him, Adam Fetterman, a senior, said that he felt confident more camps will spring up at other UC campuses soon — and that, even if UC police departments aren’t disbanded, as he’d like, officers were unarmed.
That means no pepper spray of the sort used by Lt. John Pike on Friday, when 11 protesters needed treatment after being sprayed at close range.
Pike’s image remained up on a tree, as a poster, but no other police were in sight. UCD’s administration has given no indication of how it will respond to another encampment.
Fetterman said he wasn’t sure how long protesters would keep their tents up.
“For me, the camp isn’t the most important thing,” he said. “I think the camp symbolizes something and it’s important to keep that symbol alive — like the Olympic torch or whatever — but I really just hope what comes out of this is that we demilitarize our campuses.”
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=108049
Posted by Cory Golden
on Nov 21 2011.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 03:57:15 PM PDT
Filed under UC Davis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
Yeah, now the students are safe. Because tents all over a campus at night, containing random people who may or may not be students, make things very safe.
Yes, the pepper spraying was wrong.
[...] allowed to speak at yesterday’s General Assembly on the quad, which has grown to include a giant geodesic dome. She did speak at a meeting last night, where she announced that Davis would pay students’ [...]