Life After College: Solutions on the Orange Line
Life After College is a column that updates the comings and goings of some of UC Berkeley’s newest graduates. This article was originally published by Nils Jepson in The Nilsletter in October 2019.
The Los Angeles climate strike in September of 2019. (Source: Nils Jepson)
I haven’t always been so overwhelmed by thoughts of “real change.” “Real change” was always far enough away that I could casually talk about the change we were going to make (I was going to make) without wanting to shove my head under 4 extra-large, extra-fully down pillows.
In high school, “real change” wasn’t easy but it was clear. “Real change” happened because your parents phone banked for Obama’s re-election campaign and because you spent one Saturday a month cleaning up Will Rogers beach and because you read “Beloved” in your English class and saw the most fiscally conservative, socially liberal kid you know break down into soft sobs and admit that “maybe, just maybe, okay” America might have been built on a foundation of white supremacy. “Real change” was something you aspired to because you knew you could eventually do it.
In college, “real change” seemed ideological and abstract. Obama was now a war-mongering drone-striker and beach clean-ups were just neoliberalism’s attempt to push environmental change onto the individual while continuing to pollute the California coastline and literature? Well, let’s just say literature was a bourgeoise way to engage with social issues without having to put in any work to change structures of violence and power.
“Real change” was grassroots in nature but abstract in discussion — it was always talked about and rarely seen. “Real change” was going to the Women’s March and then dissecting the Women’s March for the next two years. “Real change” was an article in the Daily Cal or a Twitter thread or a 15-page essay on “Dissent and the battle for hegemonic memory in Melville’s Billy Budd.” “Real change” was a late-night Thursday night slurred conversation after Triple Rock, after Cornerstone, after Funk Night, after a nightcap of luke-warm pink Franzia on your stained couch, with your roommates on something, something Atlanta rap is really revolutionary something that you were too hungover to remember the next morning. “Real change” was discourse analysis and primitive accumulation and the political ecology of witch hunts and Syed and Foucault and canon and abolishing the canon and something called “awareness.” “Real change” was about commas, saying “thereby” every other sentence and then “thus” and “then,” and a bunch of words you didn’t know but would try your best to hold on to but would fail to remember anyhow. It was about saying “histories” instead of “history” but forgetting what, if there is, a difference between the two. “Real change” was only missing two classes a semester, getting at least a 3.7 GPA, and holding a “Lorax” movie screening to raise money for some distant cause where 3 friends of friends showed up to get free pizza. “Real change” was constant but also absent and always on our minds. It was exhausting.
It was exhausting because it was distant but always there. It seemed impossible to do but also pressed down on you until you couldn’t breathe.
I’d take a course on, say, agricultural sociology and go through the motions. Syllabus week; a week on why corporate consolidation fucked the food system; a week on why wheat and exports and imports from India fucked the food system; a week on why the Bracero Program fucked the food system; a week on why NAFTA fucked the food system. 15 or so weeks and then I get to that last week of class—the “solutions week”—and we talk about stricter labor laws, the importance of anti-trust and unions, food sovereignty and racial equity, etc. Finally! I feel ready to help make “real change.” Or well, 2 more years left to go, and then I’ll be ready.
It’s the next semester and since I really liked that agricultural sociology class I’ve decided I’d take a course on environmental politics! That sounds important. So I’m in this class on environmental politics and syllabus week is okay and then the next week is about how George Bush fucked the Kyoto Protocol and the next week is about how Obama and Trump fucked the Paris Agreement and the next week is about how Exxon fucked public opinion concerning climate policy and the next week is about how _______ fucked _______. I finally get to “solutions week” and we talk about the Ozone Layer for a couple of minutes and the importance of electing progressive public officials and my professor smiles and says goodbye and “good luck on the final!”
I take the final, am pretty sure I’ve aced it, walk out of Barrows Hall thinking “That was a really cool class — I learned a lot! I learned that both Bush’s were the worst, I learned that there has never been successful governance concerning climate change policy. I learned about the ESA, the CBD, CITES, the Basel Convention, UNCLOS, the Espoo convention and why they failed. I learned that we have 10 years to fix all of this through successful legislation, governance, grassroots organizing, and cooperation. Maybe I’ll figure out how next semester!”
I have 3 years to figure these things out. I have two years, a summer, one last year, a semester, 4 months, 3 months, 2 months, 1 month, fuck I’m drunk at Kip’s at 6 am and I’m about to graduate. I have about 120 weeks of ________ fucking ________ and 6 or 7 weeks of “solutions.”
These solutions are all good things: a global peasant movement, UBI, cohesive policy, more public transit, free public transit, public transit policy, affordable housing (for all), diversifying the canon, more gardens, radical gardens, Trump in jail, socialism, communism. The difference now, post-graduation, was that I knew I couldn’t write about them or hold an info-session or club meeting or even teach a class on them. I had to do something “real.”
It’s been 5 months since I graduated, I’m on the bus, I’m sweating, and I’m now a “Communications Assistant.” My job description says I “perform entry-level work in support of marketing functions.” I “prepare literature,” I “maintain records,” I “research issues and support the development of specialized programs.” I “complete administrative tasks.” I’m not sure how performing “entry-level work in support of marketing functions” is going to help reform the Paris Agreement or build a diverse coalition of peasantries around the world but at least I get to ride transit for free. At least I’m not working for Nestle or some equity firm. At least I’m involved in a mission I believe in.
I’m on the Orange Line and I’m thinking about how everything in college was so big. The problems were big so the solutions had to be bigger. Everything was “systemic.” As Elizabeth Warren likes to say: everything is “big” and “structural.” The little changes don’t cut it — go big or go home, I guess.
And I think the big, ideological “real change” I learned at Berkeley was real and true. The United States is built on a system of racial oppression and we have yet to reckon with that. “Whiteness” is a plague that realizes itself (along with toxic masculinity) both in everyday life and in everyday mass shootings. Climate change is intrinsically connected to capitalism and exploitation and we can’t save our earth unless we adopt a new system of exchange. The Western literary canon is colonial and stifling and white. Industrial farming is literally killing people and destroying acres and acres of land. The economy doesn’t work for anyone I know. The prison industrial complex is an evolution of Jim Crow. We are on stolen land.
I know you can’t solve or take on any of these things in one fell swoop (nor should you, although I think a cohesive “Green New Deal” would come pretty close to knocking out at least some) but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to. I wish I could have walked past Sather Gate the second graduation ended and somehow convinced Exxon and Shell and BP to stop their shit. I wish each issue ran on a grocery-like list where I checked one off and then moved onto the next. I wish a paper I hastily submitted at 11:58 pm to bCourses on a Wednesday night could change the world or at least some minds. But it won’t and it can’t. Neither will a tweet or a blog or a newspaper article or a silly newsletter your bored friend decided to start because he was too lazy to buy a paperback journal.
You learn about “real change” in a classroom but it can’t happen in a classroom. In a classroom, an issue becomes divorced from its people and its complexities. It often becomes linear — this is bad so this needs to happen for this and that needs to happen for that and that’s how you save the bees.
You learn about climate change and how increasing transit ridership will help decrease emissions. But then you start working for an actual transit agency and realize your riders don’t give a shit about climate change and are riding because they have to, and don’t have the time to sit on a smelly train just to be environmental; everyone would rather just drive. Maybe some white, male middle-class post-grad will ride transit because it’s “fun” and “cool” and “sustainable” but a lot of people don’t have another option. It’s not “fun” and “cool” and “important” to them — it sucks and is never on time. Instead of pushing a purely environmental message, how do we make transit safer, nicer, and cheaper for people that depend on it the most?
My mind’s back on the Orange Line and I missed my stop again. I get off on Tampa, cross the station to the other side, wait 4 minutes for the east-traveling bus, and hobble on. I promise myself I wouldn’t zone out and miss my stop again so I look up and take a look around. There’s a mom holding her daughter who’s playing on an iPad, two high school kids (one of whom is reading “Animal Farm” (probably hating it) and the other who’s on their phone planning an event for her Senior Council called “Sober History” that honestly sounds hysterical and very nice), a girl with longer hair around my age reading Circe by Madeline Miller, an older man who is dozing, an older couple who are bent over speaking softly in Russian to one another, another man proudly displaying a Price Waterhouse Cooper Hydroflask, another man who is not even trying to hide the can of Bud Light he’s drinking in a brown paper bag, and me.
The bus comes to an abrupt stop at Reseda. The high schooler planning “Sober History” drops her phone and it slides on the floor and bumps the man drinking the Corona in the foot. He picks it up, smiles, and hands it back to her. They start to talk. I’m only on the bus for five more minutes but they’re chatting the whole time. I rudely try to listen in and hear they’re discussing where she wants to go to college. I think it was Middlebury.
I’m back to Balboa so I get ready to jump off the bus. As I get off and look back, the pair are still chatting.
I’ve been out of college for 4 months and I still am unsure as to what “real change” looks like. I think, though, I’m starting to get a better idea of where it starts.
I don’t want to blow the interaction between Corona man and “Sober History” girl out of proportion but I think it was the smallness of their talk that struck me most; smallness I didn’t have time for and forgot about in Berkeley. I halfway forgot that behind all of the ideology, policy solutions, Marxist analyses were people who were very much alive. “Real change” was round, not static. Ideologies live and breathe and fight and die by the living. “Real change” is led by the living: the good and the bad and the complex and the drunk and the reading and the transit-riding, car-riding, walking, biking, scootering, motorcycling, running, wheelchairing, stumbling.
The courtyard behind the Union Station Ben & Jerry’s. (Source: Nils Jepson)
I see life every day on the bus. I see it at bars and in the little courtyard tucked behind the Union Station Ben & Jerry’s where I eat lunch every day. I see it in the tents the Orange Line blasts past and the parks and donut shops with names like “Happy Donut” and “Good Donut.” I see it in the people I work with; in my “preparing literature,” “maintaining records,” “completing administrative tasks.” I’m doing small work, but it feels good. I fix a dash here and there, run a folder back and forth between departments, send the same PowerPoint edits to the same partner over and over again.
I thought this work would be exhausting but it isn’t — I’m so excited. The bigness of “real change” seems possible now because it looks alive; it’s moving and hopping and crying and breathing. “Real change” isn’t something I needed to wait for, it was something I was in. “Real change” is not precise or straightforward or easy. It’s not linear — there aren’t any steps. We’re already a part of it, we just have to do. We might be a communications assistant or a gallery attendant at BAMPFA or a Yogurtland worker or a summer intern or a facilities specialist or a blog editor or a tutor or a YMCA counselor. It doesn’t matter. Be alive and be, be, be.
