Women of Color | United States Student Association

The ‘Real’ Orange County

MTV countered FOX’s fictional series The OC with Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. UC Irvine is trapped in the heart of Orange County, and its political climate is as ludicrous as the aforementioned TV series.

Last February, 8 UC Irvine and 3 UC Riverside students were arrested for disrupting a speech by US-Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren. UC Irvine reprimanded its Muslim Student Union with a year-long suspension, but the punishment was curtailed to fall quarter 2010.

UC Irvine’s initial punishment mimicked the nonsense that is The OC, but Orange County District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas, apparently wants to give UCI a taste of the real OC:

“We must decide whether we are a country of laws or a country of anarchy,” Rackauckas said. “We cannot tolerate a preplanned violation of the law, even if the crime takes place on a school campus and even if the defendants are college students. In our democratic society, we cannot tolerate a deliberate, organized, repetitive and collective effort to significantly disrupt a speaker who hundreds assembled to hear.”

Rackauckas’ plea for justice sounds like a melodramatic script from The OC or Laguna Beach, ergo I can’t take him seriously.

I am not well-versed with the legal logistics in Orange County, but pressing charges one year after the incident seems a bit sketchy. The chronological overlap of the Irvine 11’s subpoena with the protests in Tunisia and Egypt and rippling uproars in the Arab world exponentially augment the sketchiness.

I feel like Rackauckas is using these Muslim students as a political example to implicitly define Orange County’s ideological position in the global arena of crises in the Middle East. 

Sketchiness is an understatement. MLK Jr. said it best, “Injustice anywhere [truly] is a threat to justice everywhere.”

- Suzanne