Protests

I and my kids have at different times been involved in protests on university campuses. I tend to work within systems; I and other faculty have in the past stood in faculty meetings and explained our disagreements in a courteous fashion with the administration. This is relatively safe protest, at least if you have tenure. Both of my kids have protested outside, holding signs. One of them used a bullhorn to lead marches. They are braver than I by far.

So we have had occasion to talk about protests as they grew up. I held up Gandhi's march to the sea to make salt in defiance of a British ban as a good example: public breaking of an unjust law demonstrating how unjust it is. The protest tied directly to the doing of the thing. Hard to talk about the protest without discussing the subject of the protest.

Both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led protests (at great personal risk) that entailed the protesters acting as full citizens (e.g. sitting in the "wrong" section of a lunch counter) to demonstrate the injustice. Again, hard to separate the protest from the issue.

The thing I've always told my kids was to make sure that the attention their protest garners should be for the issue and not for the protesters. I have seen as an undergraduate where the balance went the other way, which will always be the default as long as "hey look at me" is part of our vocabulary.

In particular when the focus is on the protesters it gives opponents a handle, something my old Judo instructor told us never to do. It allows reactionaries to focus on the protesters (who on university campuses are already part of the elite, whose employment as students with academic responsibilities are not visible to television audiences) as a challenge to the system and ignore why the system should be challenged.

On the other side this past week a lot of administrations have defaulted to direct suppression (which never resolves the issue, but only defers its appearance) instead of just out-waiting the students as summer approaches. Their leaders have degrees but not necessarily common sense, although we never know what kind of pressure alumni donors exert at times like this.

The thing that saddens me is how much I've said already and how much more I could say without ever talking about the deaths and suffering in Gaza, of the bad actors willing to hurt others to make political gains such as the Hamas terrorists and Netanyahu, of the historical tensions in that area, of the US role in making the area more dangerous, etc. In that sense I would say that the protests have not succeeded in helping Gaza.