UC Davis Police Pepper-Spray Seated Students In Occupy Dispute (VIDEO) (UPDATE)

It’s déjà vu all over again:

Reports of the recent cancellati­on of a UC Regents meeting, because of fears of student protests, disturbed the ghosts of the student movement of the 1960s.

Already, members of the media were hyping this new wave of student activism, crystalliz­ed by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as “the Free Speech Movement of the 21st Century.”

In 1967, one of my projects as a newly minted member of the California Legislatur­e’s staff was to follow the dynamics of Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus and the battle being waged by newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan to “clean up the mess” there and cut UC funding.

I see some parallels between the two movements.

The Free Speech Movement began on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964 as a protest against the University­’s edict banning on-campus political speech and activities­.

After a tumultuous year of sit-ins, rallies and protests, the University relented, allowing political activity on Sproul Plaza. What FSM had started there spread to campuses nationwide­.

A speech by Berkeley activist, Mario Savio, at the height of the 1964 protests, has become the anthem of many in the Occupy Movement, particular­ly here in California­.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—mak­es you so sick at heart—that you can't take part,” Savio said. “You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

That rhetoric reverberat­es in Occupy’s broad insistence that our political system is rigged in favor of the privileged few—that 1%. In the Golden State, Occupy Cal has placed special focus on issues like those rocking UC in 1967, when newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan moved to “clean up the mess in Berkeley” and cut higher-ed funding.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost