Prius Owner Vandalized by Eco-Terrorists!

Santa Cruz is in the conservative crosshairs again.

The very name of our surf town sends wingnuts into a tofu-foaming, crystal-smashing fit. This past week, I found myself as a mysterious statistic in one of their tempests.

My story starts with the media coverage of a pro-peace student group at U.C. Santa Cruz, "Students Against War." They've had tremendous success pressuring military recruiters off of campus.

They organize to stop the armed forces from showing up at campus job fairs with their "Go To Exotic Places and Kill People" rap. I like their politics. I went to UCSC too, a twenty years ago, and was involved in similiar activities.

UCSC is the biggest employer in our town, the reason we have a sizeable population and traffic snarls most of the year. Ever since they broke ground in 1967, there has been a resentment by "old-timers" that the university brought braless heathens, pot smokers, and liberal politics to an otherwise peaceful (redneck) hamlet. Our local paper, The Sentinel, likes to intensify this town/gown seething at every opportunity.

I don't know if I'm being contrary, but THESE days, it seems like the older generation in "town" is far more New Age and liberal than the students on campus. Gown drinks more beer; Town smokes more weed.

This year, army recruiters declined to come and face the protestors, and their plight aroused outrage from hawks around the country. It became a Drudge Report hysteria item.

I may be cynical, but I don't think the recruiters retreated because satanic communist hippies run the university— if only that were true! If they did, maybe they would do something to alleviate the traffic mess.

No, the bigger issue is that military pitchmen have no prayer of recruiting upper middle class kids from Orange County whose GOP parents are footing the bill for their darling sons to matriculate from Banana Slug U.

The majority of UCSC students today, despite what you've heard, are upper-class, apolitical, sheltered, and vaguely conservative— like every other elite campus in the UC system. They aren't going to Iraq— not because they take a stand— but because mommy and daddy have other plans. The recruiters will do much, much better hassling people at the junior college (which they do) or the working class high schools.

Nevertheless, Michelle Malkin, hippie-hating blogger extraordinare, went ballistic on the Student Against War activists, and published  their home addresses and phone numbers, prompting tidal waves of hate mail and death threats.

I hesitate to link you to Malkin; I'll let you find her on your own. Suffice to say she makes Rush Limbaugh look like a drug-addled old hasbeen. Oh, right...

This all reached fever pitch LAST week, Easter week. On Saturday, I woke up and went out to the car with baskets of eggs, ready to embark to our annual pagan preparations. As we drove off, I changed lanes and realized someone had smashed my passenger side-view mirror.

I got out, looked around, and discovered the passenger door had been dented as well.

SHIT! You know how it is when someone wrecks your car. But I wasn't about to cancel my Easter Egg Hunt. So I decided to deal with it the next day.

Sunday morning I picked up the daily Sentinel with the blazing headline:

Men in Black Vandalize SUVs on Santa Cruz's Westside!

Vandals apparently went wild in my neighborhood— slashing tires, breaking mirrors, keying paint jobs. Some cars with spray-painted with left-wing "politically charged" slogans.

The Sentinel found one "witness," a hopping mad Ms. Andrea Muzzi, who said she saw 30-40 young people in black trenchcoats (Matrix!) riding away on 10-speeds. Muzzi surmised they must be radical Slugs!

She has re-graffittied her own car to read: "Die UCSC."

The Sentinel story, aided by Malkin, has now got everyone in the country thinking that it's the student peace group that ran amok.

I called the police to report my disaster too, and they were quite interested to hear from another victim from the exact same area and time period. 

But I had a new angle for them. I said, "My car is a HYBRID— I drive a Prius." Can the Sentinel explain that?

I wonder how many marauding right and left wing vandals could be working the same block at the same time. With 40 bicycles in the street, it could get chaotic. The police, meanwhile, are flummoxed. Ms. Muzzo is not their star.

Me— I don't think it was the Baader-Meinhof gang. It certainly wasn't Students Against War. I say, it was a bunch of drunk assholes, who along with the desperate junkies, are the two groups who usually vandalze cars in our "historic" neighborhood. 

But now the FBI has been brought in! Gosh, we know how tough they're cracking down on environmental terrorists! I hope they've brought plenty of fax toner! Can they get me a rental while my car's in the shop?

Someone's cute kids... location unknown!

Comments

[Tomo]

oy, that's pretty damn crappy. I'm sorry to hear of your plight Susie. That's my only problem with some protesters, they go too far, idiots think it'll be fun to join for the sake of slashing a few tires, and generally, it's just bad PR for the rest of whatever they happen to "support"

This sorta brings me back to those anti-war marches with the FBI agents macing random onlookers to insight a riot...

But I digress, I hope your car gets repaired and whoever did that gets their sorry little ass hauled off to some kind of justice.

[Steve]

Ewww. Sorry about your car. That kind of thing can leave such a feeling of violation. Thank goodness it's "just a car," and can be repaired.

By the way, Teri says to tell you she totally loves her car (kind of like the previous owner.) It now has like 75,000 miles on it. She has had her own body work saga - hit a deer, as 1 in 5 people in our area do each year - but it has been repaired and everything is cool.

[Sheila Bishop]

Just have to say that these two entries (this one and the one on race and porn) were wonderful brain food as I slowly wake up on a Sunday morning.

[Alana Noel Voth]

Good Morning, Susie:

Sorry about your Prius. Vandalism sucks and gives you that same creepy feeling as finding a nasty note taped to the door of your locker in high school. It's so passive-aggressive, don't you think, vandalism. Anyway, you're probably right about the identity of the perps. BTW: I appreciated your comments about military recruitment. Michael Moore made the same point in Fahrenheit 9/11. Once in a while my son asks me, "Mom, will the President make me go to war when I'm older?" He's terrified of being shipped off to fight and "shoot people" and get shot at(despite his enthusiasm for video games) and I've told him probably not because he wouldn't pass the pyhsical requirements with his asthma. Although his asthma is problematic you know what he said to me? "Thank God for asthma."

[tara]

your town sounds like a mess! but in some ways a really good mess. a lot of um passion and expressed conflict. i live in a passive, catatonic, too scared to talk to strangers kind of town. they like to make $.

sorry about your car though. that's just wrong. especially the Prius part.

and (to alana) i don't think vandalism is passive aggressive. i think it is very straightforwardly aggressive. how about anonymous-aggressive.

and speaking of my town and vandalism. my boyfriend once took a starbucks sandwich board and covered up the cityhall sign with it. in the middle of the night. a woman driving by honked her approval as he was doing it. that was a nice moment.

[Technomad]

Personally, I would say that _letting_ the recruiters come and present their case would speak far better for UCSC than preventing them. Only people with a very weak case have to resort to screaming down opposition, or the "heckler's veto."

And, frankly, I've spent enough time around college campuses to have formed a pretty firm impression that mandatory pre-college military service would improve campus culture a hundred-thousandfold. Let the guys get the wildness out of their systems _before_ heading to college; they'll arrive three or four years older, with a lot better idea of what they want to do with themselves and their lives, _and_ money to spend of their own, instead of having to lean on Mommy and Daddy. I do think that the veterans I've known who were in college were heads-and-shoulders above their non-veteran classmates, and it wasn't just being a few years older. My dad told me that the first big dent in a lot of the more a$$hatted college traditions, like hazing freshmen, came with the big wave of veteran-students right after World War II.

[Adrienne]

This is my first time reading the blog and I found your first entry fascinating and funny.

I recently graduated from a generic midwestern land grant university... the amount of just general violent assholes was amazing. It got to the point where I wouldn't dare drive through the central bar district on 'drinking nights' (that would be most nights, haha) because of attacks to me or my car. (I once ran screaming and swearing after 3 guys after catching them *urinating* on my car parked in nearby lot.)

No political agenda (though during the light of day the vocal majority was wealthy and conservative), just drunk assholes! I guess that simple truth of people developing into and living as jerks is too disturbing to address. Apparently, in your case, it was easier to classify it as some sort of terrorism.

[C.S. Lewiston]

"i think [vandalism] is very straightforwardly aggressive. how about anonymous-aggressive."

How about chickenshit?

Digression: I live in a formerly - make that VERY formerly - industrial upstate NY town which is home to a State University of New York campus. While our industries were going great guns in the 1960's, 70's, and 80's (defense contracts deluxe!) the locals loved to whine and moan about those “SUNY sickies”. THEY were the Commie hippie dope fiends who impugned President Nixon’s valiant efforts in Vietnam. THEY were the ones bringing the evils of dope, homosexuality and women’s-lib to our 100%-American community from that stinking cesspool of filth, free love and liberalism, New York City. Never mind that for years the university was the only venue in town for not only major rock acts but jazz, folk and world music too. Never mind that it was the only alternative to our town’s one very stodgy art gallery. And never mind all of the money those lily-livered long-hairs and nattering no-bras brought into the local economy!

As for the FBI being brought in to investigate vandalism in your community, didn't some captain of industry point out recently that the BIGGEST terror threat this country faces is from environmentalists? Heck, if he's right, then we have absolutely nothing to worry about! Heck, if a bunch of eco-protestors is the worst threat we have to face, then we're doing ALL RIGHT! Osama Bin Laden will soon be a cashier at Wal-Mart!

[solace]

Here is something for everyone to think about, one out of ten vandals are known to you, they are the cheery happy people who look you in the face in the morning and tell you to have a nice day, they stand next to you while the profanity is running freely about the damage to your house or car. If the group was targeting SUV’s, how many vehicles weren’t SUV’s? Those ones were targeted by someone else with their own personal agenda taking advantage of what was happening. Therefore, the answer to who vandalized your car Susie may be out your office window.

[Rowan]

Susie-

You're right to scratch your head about who really is responsible for the vandalism. I doubt that it was the "liberal slugs" who did all this damage. It was probably drunk assholes and/or people out to create contempt for the
pro-peace, environmentally minded activists.

Recently in my town, three churches-- Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Jewish-- were vandalized with pentagrams bearing Baphomet's head, 666's, and upside down crosses. The synagogue was defaced with Nazi propoganda as well. This was not the work of "Satanists" or even actual Nazis. This was the work of people trying to incite fear-- not a "we hate your kind" type of fear-- but a "let's fuck shit up and scare people. Won't it be fun?" type of fear. Of course the paper had a different slant.

I wager that in Santa Cruz some people took this opportunity to break stuff and point the at someone else.

[Ellin Beltz]

Vandalism is not only stupid; it's a crime.

There is no justification for messing with or damaging the possessions of another person whether they are a redwood tree, an SUV, a flower, a fence, a wall or any inanimate object.

The anger which flowed from them so easily can flow in you as you feel the violation of their senseless act.

I am sorry this happened to you. I hope the local police do what is needful to bring the perps. to treatment for their obvious mental problems.

Just being white, unhappy and in college is no more of an excuse for felonious behavior than being black, poor and flunking out of high school. Either is a set of choices. Neither should result in personal or property damage to other people.

I am sorry it happened to you. We awoke one morning back in Chicago to find our car looking like it had been through a meteor shower of basketballs.

It's still a dented old paid-for Jeep Cherokee (21mpg). I haven't the money to get the big dent on the hood pounded out. I imagine the punks who did it got their degrees and have a $50,000/year jobs. I only hope they live in fear that their BMWs get flattened by someone just as stupid as they are.

[C.S. Lewiston]

I wonder what those nazi-punk-wanna-be's would do if they ever encountered a faction of actual Aryan-Nation-types? I suspect that it would involve heavily soiling their undergarments.

Malicious behavior is a time-dishonored tradition among certain segments of the population. Some psychopathic types just live to fuck someone else's shit up for their own amusement. I suspect that many citizens of Nazi Germany could have cared less about Hitler or about Euopean Jewry, just as long as they got to trash and loot some storefronts or gang up on passers-by.

[Rowan]

C.S. Lewiston-
I surmise the same thing when it comes to pseudo-Nazis and their undergarments. :)

This type of activity (vandalism) when there is division/fear triggers some of the worst witch hunting. It's heart breaking.

Rowan