Protests, yesterday and today

I’ve been trying to figure it out: Are these campus protests like our campus protests? How are they similar? How are they different?

And does any of that matter?

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded an end to an unjust war. I was one of them. (A few years later, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded concrete movement toward racial justice.)

We chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and painted signs and erected barricades and marched and held teach-ins and wanted our colleges to stop collaborating with a government that napalmed a far-away nation. We wanted divestment—although we may not yet have discovered that word—and we also wanted more freedom on our campuses and more responsive administrations.

Some of us took over buildings—yes, the same one at Columbia that students occupied this time—and draped the walls with anti-war slogans. There was, too, occasional property damage and vandalized campus buildings.

A very few of us actively sabotaged defense department work on our campuses, but rarely did we set up tents anywhere. And sometimes, law enforcement was called in to end our protests by flummoxed administrators who didn’t know what else to do, and students were brutalized and arrested. It didn’t happen often back then—not nearly as often as it appears to be happening now—but when it did, at Kent State, it was shocking.

All sounds pretty similar to today. But there are striking differences, too.

We had more at stake. The United States wasn’t complicit in supporting a far-away war; it was actually fighting that war, with as they say, boots on the ground. And college students, young people, us, could be drafted to fight. The draft undoubtedly gave a greater sense of urgency to our protests.

So, we didn’t want a ceasefire. We wanted an end to the war and an end to the risk of our having to fight that war.

Since we had more on the line, our protests were, at least in part, more self-interested. Today’s protestors generally have nothing directly to gain, and much—being beaten by the police, suspension, expulsion, arrest—to lose.

The other difference, I would think, is that nearly sixty years ago our protests were for the most part an exercise in solidarity. There was perhaps a false sense of unanimity; so many of us were against the war. There were differences in tactics, obviously, between, say, the Weather Underground and liberal Democrats, but the general goal, at least originally, had been the same.

Today, while the vast majority of the protestors are pro-Palestinian groups, there are also pro-Israeli groups on campus, counter-protestors. There is obviously much less a sense of common purpose among students.

The other difference, I think, is the phone. Watching video of campus demonstrations, of police removing the encampments, you have to be struck by how many students are holding up their phones and recording what is happening as it is happening to them.

They are memorializing and sharing the experience in a way that we never could. And I wonder: Is that helping spread the word, converting anyone? Or is it simply the automatic response of a younger generation to see the world through a very small lens?

We, on the other hand, are perhaps looking at today’s protests through a more ambivalent lens.

Many of us sympathize with both the passion and concern of those demonstrating, but think some may have gone too far. We feel justified anger at college administrators who call the police on peaceful student protestors but wonder about the safety of other students who may not feel safe on their campus.

There’s disgust with Netanyahu and the Israeli right and with their relentless, deadly assault but no sympathy or support for the terrible terrorism  of Hamas.

Maybe, it turns out, ambivalence is easier for the old than for the young.