Guest Post: 'UCLA Can’t Have the Love I Once Had For It'
In which a student considers what happened to her—and all of us—last spring
Last spring, our campus got rocked.
We’re all trying to pick up the pieces.
Some of us lost friendships.
Others don’t feel safe.
Some wonder what universities really stand for.
We were all affected.
A few of us went to jail.
This is one of those stories.
Against the Wall
I burst into tears in my boss's brand new Ford Bronco.
Seven months after my mandated court appearance. A year after the arrest. I’m back in SoCal for work. But instead of that work, I’m on the phone with lawyers and texting coordinators and professors trying to get my stolen property back from UCPD. The property manager at the station apparently has a “thing” and can’t let me pick up my phone until 4:30pm, instead of handing it back to me at 1:45pm, when I arrive.
For whatever reason, I felt like I was there again. Against the wall. Asking the officers why they’d arrested us. In the jail bus, asking when we’d be let out to use the bathroom. On the blacktop, waiting to get processed. In the holding cell, waiting to get a wristband, my fingerprints scanned, to be let back out again. Always waiting on their time.
In every article, it says we were arrested at a protest. But it wasn’t a protest. We were a group of people, meeting on our campus, plans unestablished. No dispersal order was given. No word of warning. No chance to bow out. Just get against the wall. Put your hands behind your back.
Police in riot gear lined the walls as we sat there on the dusty ground, handcuffed. Who were they there to use those shields against? Those batons? The rubber bullet guns? What protest was occuring there for them to stop? Why would they need to stop it at all?
Growing up going to protests, walkouts, to March For Our Lives against gun violence in D.C. I’d never seen police presence like I saw during that month at UCLA. Against a bunch of kids who wanted freedom in Palestine.
But time passes. I’ve graduated, and started a new life.
My 19-year-old coworker asks during a boring shift if I’ve ever been arrested. I tell her I had, charged with conspiracy to commit burglary. A bonkers charge. My initial arrest report says I was stopped for loitering.
She grins, showing off colorful braces. “Damn, it was ‘Free You’ for a moment there.”
My other coworker who knows me better interjects that I was arrested for a good reason. I was protesting. But there’s hardly a good reason to be arrested, especially when you’re young. And I wasn’t protesting. I changed the subject.
A year out, the bruises are gone, so is the constant anxiety that everytime I walk into a parking lot the cops will follow just behind me. But the anger of what happened lingers within me, the matter of fact injustice in it. But also that it came on the heels of the siege on the Palestinian solidarity encampment, the violence of the pro-Israel mob attack. The school got cocky. It thought it could get away with whatever it wanted. And in a way, it did.
A year out, the bruises are gone, so is the constant anxiety that everytime I walk into a parking lot the cops will follow just behind me.
Two nights before I pick up my phone, UCLA calls the police on students screening a documentary about what happened the last time UCLA called the police on students. I watch from home, the footage of the students, terrified, but fighting for what is right, and having the rest of the world intentionally misunderstand them.
My therapist tells me that anger is a secondary emotion. It comes from pain. I loved UCLA for nearly four years. Loved the buildings and the balmy weather, however much I complained about it. I loved my friends and my programs. That day— the arrest, the theft — dashed whatever love and respect I still had. It wasn’t all that violent. I took off my love for my school the way I took off my great grandmother’s wedding ring to be placed in a clear plastic bag with the rest of my belongings. A deliberate motion, but one conducted against my will. UCLA can’t have the love I once had for it. A painful realization made while my arms numbed from the zip tie cuffs. One I hardly realized I was coming to.
When I think about seeing the campus again to pick up my belongings after a long, long year, nostalgia isn’t what hits me. It is only the pain that I felt that day, and during the encampment, and all the protests and actions after that. Hence, I burst into tears in my boss’s new Ford Bronco.