Hope can be found in campus protests
Lately I’ve been asked more than once, by gloomy but concerned people, if I see any signs of hope in the Gaza situation for those who consider the current attack on it morally unacceptable. It’s vexing, as if the askers feel entitled to hope since they invested morally.
People I’ve known who were the fiercest fighters for justice, like union leaders Kent Rowley, Madeleine Parent or Bob White, would’ve never asked. They acted simply because it was right.
But if you’re still wondering, I’d say hope can be found in the student protests now spreading globally. I say this guardedly, as someone who was at Columbia during the ’68 antiwar protest there, where the aftermath included electing Richard Nixon and escalating, in the argot of the era, to even bloodier U.S. military onslaughts on Southeast Asia.
(I have an odd view, literally, of this round of student tumult. I teach a summer class at the University of Toronto that looks directly out on the “encampment” there, as we discuss origins of various media. Students glance out the window and say it’s like watching history unfold, while we examine, say, the roots of writing.)
I’d say as a past participant in such events, that they’re often exhilarating and instructive. You likely wouldn’t stick around if they weren’t. But this edition seems to me more impressive than those back then.
How? In the 1960s, in the U.S., students felt directly implicated. It was their country dropping the huge tonnage of bombs, often secretly, and they were eligible to be drafted or, alternately, cut all ties and move to Canada. There’s something selfless and altruistic about students taking a stand absent of those personal motivations.
Hence the hope. One source of the social justice tradition is the Biblical prophets. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, prophets like Amos and Jeremiah didn’t denounce injustice. That happens in the earliest pages of the Bible, when Cain murders his brother, Abel, and Abel’s blood “cries from the ground.” What the prophets uniquely denounced, said Heschel, wasn’t injustice, it was indifference. The protests and encampments pass that test.
The current protests are also, to latch onto a term, more inclusive. Young white men were probably the majority then, certainly among the leaders. At Columbia, Black students hived off and occupied Hamilton Hall, which was also occupied this time. Women had to struggle for a voice, during the dawn of that era’s feminism.
This movement is far more diverse, including minorities and Indigenous people in the U.S. or Canada, and international students, who take special risks by participating.
That may help account for the spread of student protests to places like India, Pakistan, Japan, Argentina. This partly bridges the gap that opened between the West and the rest, after Israel’s invasion.
It’s still a bit mysterious how this opposition arose, in defiance of the narrative that dominated attitudes toward the Middle East for decades and was highly slanted in Israel’s favour. The mainstream media hasn’t changed its historic tilt, but many of the young have slipped from its reach.
They rarely consult newspapers and often can’t tell a network from a channel, which they associate with the internet, not broadcasting. Their sources are social media, citizen journalism, or Al Jazeera. It’s been delightfully disruptive.
The mainstream media and their loyal audiences have reacted with a mix of dismay and dismissive. I don’t deny that students tend to the overstated or extreme, for a good reason: they haven’t yet had a full range of experiences to factor in.
But really, you can’t resolve a mess like this with arguments, all of which I’ve heard more or less verbatim since the mid-1900s. You react as a moral agent, to what you see in front of you.
Students get things wrong, it’s how they learn. They aren’t always well informed, but you’re more likely to get informed after you get involved. First, you overcome indifference; then you get smarter. Why would you put in the effort to figure it out if you didn’t care deeply?