Student protests a reminder of 1968

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed with police officers — whose brutal role in the confrontation later was described by a federal commission as a “police riot” — hijacking the focus of the convention.

Those young demonstrators had come of age seeing continual — and effective — protests during the civil rights movement and national mourning after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This was a generation primed for protest, with moral conviction as the foundation of its outrage about the Vietnam War — the first television war, one in which Americans could see the horrors of war, almost in real time — and the draft that saw around 2 million Americans conscripted during the era. The movement against it began mostly on college campuses and grew.

Of course, semesters end and students go home for the summer. But their opposition to the war didn’t end with the academic year. In the months leading up to the ’68 DNC in August, organizers planned a major protest, intended to be held regardless of whether it was sanctioned, drawing students from around the country.

This is all playing out again. Young people, in particular, are paying attention to the Israel-Hamas war and many are horrified by what they see. They’ve also grown up with protest movements — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, student gun control campaigns in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida — as the backdrop of their lives. And we’re seeing antiwar protests spread across college campuses.

As in 1968, the semester soon will end and those students will leave for the summer, allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the DNC in Chicago in August.

Antiwar groups already are planning large protests at the convention. “We’ll be marching with or without permits,” Hatem Abudayyeh, of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, recently told The Chicago Tribune. “This DNC is the most important one since 1968, also in Chicago, when Vietnam War protesters and the Black liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently repressed.”

And you can see substantial support for their cause. Although the spring 2024 Harvard Youth Poll found that 18-to-29-year-olds tended to rate most other major issues, including inflation and immigration, as more important than the Israel-Palestine conflict, the survey found that “young Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza by a five-to-one margin.”

There seems to be a sense in the Biden campaign that it simply can wait the protesters out, that passions will eventually fade and that Democratic voters will fall in line when we get closer to Election Day and the choice between Biden and Donald Trump becomes more stark.

That is a reckless gamble. The protesters and many voters are upset about something more than a regular matter of foreign policy. They feel personally implicated in a conflict in which the death toll continues to rise, with no end in sight.

At this point in the war, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,000 have been wounded, local health officials say, in an area with a population of around 2 million people.

The numbers are staggering, the level of suffering unacceptable. Young people will make that point clear this summer in Chicago.