Embark Now
01/09/2005
- Opinión
In the U.S. summer is winding down. Soon U.S. students will trek back to school,
including college. Would that I was one of them, not because it would mean I
was forty years younger - though that would be a nice turn of events - but
because this is the first Fall semester in thirty years I have felt the desire
to be scaling ivy walls and prowling campus corridors.
What's coming to NYU, Wisconsin, SF State, MIT, Howard, Pepperdine, Morehouse,
Purdue, Loyola? What's coming to Drake, Kansas State, Rutgers, Boston
University, University of Chicago, Duke, Berkeley, Kent State? What's coming to
Reed, Bucknell, Colombia, Vanderbilt, Austin, Evergreen, Concordia, Yale,
Jackson State - and all the rest?
Tumult, turmoil, tension, and resistance? Rejection and revolt? That's what
ought to happen. It's what I hope will happen.
Flash back to May 1970: Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia.
Already intense campus unrest dramatically escalated. National guard shot to
death four students at Kent State University. Campuses erupted. Two were killed
and twelve wounded at Jackson State. About 2,000 students were arrested in the
first half of May 1970. Campuses were declared in a state of emergency in
Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and South Carolina. At least a third of the nation's
nearly 3,000 colleges had strikes. Over 80% of all colleges and universities
had protests. Approximately four million students, half the country's total,
and 350,000 faculty members actively participated in strikes. Buildings were
shut down. Highways were blocked. Campuses were closed. Nixon's Scranton
Commission reported that roughly three quarters of all students supported the
strikes. Pollsters reported that within campuses alone over a million people
claimed to favor revolution and called themselves revolutionaries. In early
1971 the New York Times reported that four out of ten students, about three
million people, thought a revolution was needed in the United States. This
upsurge and the civil rights and then black power movement, the women's
movement, the antiwar movement, and the youth rebellion behind it, together
threatened the very fabric of society and thereby helped end a war and turn the
country's mentality inside out and upside down. Racism was under seige. Sexism
was in retreat. Suburban culture was tottering. A gigantic war machine felt
shackles. Even capitalism had cracks. But the desire to attain a better world
did not last sufficiently long or grow sufficiently wide to replace
Washington's White House and Wall Street's corporations which, instead, went on
producing greed and domination. Capitalism's institutional persistence slowly
eroded and even devoured my generation's aspirations for solidarity and self
management.
Flash forward thirty five years to next week: Imagine students back on their
campuses. Do they discuss what courses to take? Ways to hook up with new guys
or gals? Upcoming athletic seasons? I'd be surprised if not, but I hope
students' also focus on war and peace. I hope they focus on New Orleans, and
why calamities afflict the poor so much worse than all others. I hope they
focus on why life in the world is so much less than it could be for the
starving, the bombed, the unemployed, and for those working at jobs that rob
dignity, stifle creativity, and subject so many souls to stupefying rule by
others. I hope they even talk about working at elite jobs and having no time to
live, no space to be humane, and no meaning beyond the next dollar. I hope
students' main topic this Fall is what they want out of life, spiritually,
emotionally, intellectually, and yes, materially, and how they are going to get
it consistent with their working hard for everyone else getting it too.
Imagine students asking why their curriculums produce ignorance about
international relations, ignorance about market competition's violations of
solidarity, sagacity, and sustainability.
Imagine students deciding enough is enough. Maybe one particular student who
wears a funny hat and has a history of being aloof, or perhaps one who looks
straight as a commercial and was high school class most likely to have a
million friends, will write a song about masters of the universe - and
unseating them. Maybe another student will write about floods drowning people's
hopes, and about a rising tide of our own compassionate creation lifting
people's prospects. Maybe another student will write about resurgent racism and
sullying sexism, and then about combative communalism and feminism and their
time finally coming. And maybe students will hum the new tunes and sing the new
lyrics - and rally, march, sit in, occupy, all while waving a big, solid fist.
Imagine students not just sending out emails to their friends and allies, but
entering dorms and knocking on every door, initiating long talks, communicating
carefully-collected information and debating patiently-constructed arguments
that address not only war and poverty, but also positive prospects we prefer.
Imagine students earmarking fraternity and sorority members, athletes, and
scholars, for conversation, debate, incitement, and recruitment. Imagine
students come to see their campuses as places that should be churning out
activists and dissent and come to see themselves as having no higher calling
than making that campus-wide dissent happen.
Imagine students schooling themselves outside the narrow bounds of their
colleges, learning that there is an alternative to cutthroat competition and
teaching themselves to describe that alternative and to inspire others with it,
to refine it, and especially to formulate and implement paths by which to
attain it.
Imagine students, now sharing many views and much spirit, angry and also
hopeful, sober and also laughing, sitting in dorms and dining areas forming
campus organizations, or even campus chapters of a larger encompassing national
community of organizations - perhaps something called students for a
participatory society this time around - or even students for a participatory
world - and maybe even having each chapter choose its own local name. Dave
Dellinger SPS. Emma Goldman SPS. Malcolm X SPS. And for that matter, Rosa
Luxembourg SPS, Emiliano Zapata SPS, Che Guevara SPS. And so on.
Imagine, in short, students rising up with information, relentless focus, and
some abandon too, becoming angry, militant, and aggressive, but keeping
foremost mutual concern and outreaching compassion.
Imagine all this pumping into the already nationally growing U.S. dissent
against war and injustice, pumping into the neighborhood associations and union
gatherings and church cells and GI resistance, a youth branch willing to break
the laws of the land and to push thoughts and deeds even into revolutionary
zones. Imagine students singing, dancing, marching, and law breaking up a storm.
That is something the antiwar movement, the anti corporate globalization
movement, the movement for civil rights and against racism and sexism, the
movements for local rights against environmental degradation, the movements for
consumer rights against corporate commercialism, and the labor movement too,
all need.
We need youth.
Imagine young people, with time, energy, heart, and mind, discerning that they
are being coerced by society most often to become passive victims, sometimes to
become passive agents, occasionally to become active perpetrators but only as
cruel and rich beneficiaries of society's injustices. Imagine students seek
more and other. Imagine they hunker down for the long haul, much better
equipped and much better oriented than my generation ever was.
I think, I hope, students are about to not only reject statist war and
corporate greed, but to carry that rejection into positive advocacy and anger
that gives entire campuses and not small sub communities sustained commitment.
That will be a ticket to a new world for everyone, a ticket much better than
old style graduation into the morally decrepit world all around us. This trip
is long. But why not embark now?
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