Cañada College students who owed just $1 at the start of the semester were dropped from their classes. Just another burden added on top of their already increasing tuitions, rising healthcare costs and home foreclosures.

“I noticed the demoralization in my students,” said Professor Elizabeth Terzakis. But rather than let students’s growing concerns consume them, Terzakis decided to kick off Cañada’s Social Justice series with a panel of student Occupy activists.

Students at the College of San Mateo had organized their own Occupy movement in October, but Student Activities Coordinator Victoria Worch said no Cañada student groups had organized any such protest. She said Cañada students who had participated in Occupy movements chose to go to San Francisco or Oakland, where the action was “really happening.”

But Terzakis wanted to let her students know that students everywhere were feeling the same despair and frustration, not just in the larger metropolises.

“Many of them are going through these problems [like foreclosures and increasing costs] alone,” Terzakis said. “So I wanted to bring a panel to show that they could have a collective voice.”

Ariella Powers, formerly a community college student who is now at UC Berkeley, said Occupy’s open discourse was “one of the most beautiful parts of the movement” and was what drew her in.

In response to the oft critique that the Occupy movement doesn’t know what it wants, Powers highlighted the democratic and participatory nature of these gatherings.

For once, people had a place to gather to air their grievances and bounce their ideas off other Occupy members, she said.

Gaston Lau, a panelist from Occupy CCSF, said that the Occupy movements have united the globe, with protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, and Wisconsin. He said his generation was lucky to be able to engage in discourse so early in their lives.

“This is a historical necessity,” Lau said. “Older folk have been waiting their whole lives for this moment.”

Up in Arms

After the talk, most students bustled off to class, but others stayed around to speak with Occupy Redwood City members and the panelists.

“I had no idea about half the things they were talking about,” said student Evelyn Barrerea, 18, who attended at the encouragement of Professor Terzakis. “But now my eyes are open to all the things going on in government.”

Students signed up for Occupy Redwood City’s e-mail list and wanted to attend the weekly General Assemblies in Courthouse Square.

“It’s great to see people coming to a small community college,” said student Brigitte Rafdel, 20, who signed up on the e-mail list. “It’s a movement of people, a movement that’s really about them.”

Though the Internet has been a public forum and safe haven for protesters, Rafdel said it was important to organize in person.

Occupy Redwood City organizer Aaron Castle said the youth’s participation was inspiring.

“Back in my day, we didn’t question society,” Castle said. “We thought they had our backs.” 

But even for those who will never attend a protest, panelist Melissa Cornelius, who just graduated from UC Santa Cruz, stressed the importance of voting on two proposed taxes on the November ballot. The oil tax would place a 15 percent “severance tax” on companies that extract and sell oil in California, the only state that does not currently have such a tax. The second is the millionaires’ tax, which would tax people making over $1 million an additional 3 percent tax on their income and those making over $2 million an additional 5 percent.

From the taxes, 38 percent would go to the community college system, 37 percent to K-12 education, 14 percent to the Cal State University system and 11 percent to the University of California system. The revenue generated would bring education budgets back up to pre-2007 levels, Cornelius said.

Overcoming the Violence

Yet many students in the audience probed the student protesters about the violence commonly associated with the Occupy movements, an association that the panelists believed was unfair.

All were quick to clarify that the violence portrayed in the media of setting fires and smashing windows at Occupy Oakland protests.

Far more violence was done protesters, they said, to students at UC Davis when campus police casually sprayed streams of pepper spray onto sitting protesters.

“The violence I’ve seen has been done in defense,” said Powers, who was arrested in Oakland on Saturday during what was meant to be a Community Day in a publicly-owned vacant building.

“I’d also like to flip that [association of violence] on its head,” said Cornelius who was arrested twice herself for peaceful protests.

Cornelius defined violence as harm done to any living being. “How much violence has been done to those Americans who live in poverty thanks to our current system?”

Though Lau said that there has much sleep deprivation and frustration since joining this movement, he has never been more optimistic.

“The 1% has the resources and the system supporting them,” he said. “But we have the people and the will to fight.”

“I have never felt greater power as an individual,” Powers said. “One day, I hope to live in a world where education is free for all.”

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