Thursday, May 02, 2024
Political Mayhem Thursday: Politics and Protest
I'd like to step back a minute. Before the Gaza protests spread to other campuses. Before the police moved in at Columbia, at Yale, at Univ. of Texas and other places. Before the map of protests looked like the Pappa John's locator.
In the beginning of all this, the President of Columbia decided to take a hard line on the protestors in her Congressional testimony-- or, at least a harder line than some of her colleagues did (including the subsequently-fired president of Harvard). I think that was a real inflection point. I wrote previously about how these protests seem to draw people searching for meaning, and I wonder about the intersection of that and what Columbia's President did in her testimony.
Will the protests change anything? IPLawGuy says no, because there is not a specific ask out there. I'm not so sure-- but I'm also not sure that the change would be good.
Protests like this usually both result from and accelerate young people's sense that government does not work, other than as an instrument of oppression and wealth generation for the privileged. There is some truth in that, of course: governments do oppress people and often advantage the already advantaged. But it doesn't have to be that way, and sometimes isn't, but only if people who care engage with the system, and this all pushes the other way.
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What's the ask here? Stop the War in Gaza? Stop supporting Israel? Divest from Israel? None of these things are attainable goals.
If chaos is the goal, that helps Trump. And that will NOT help these protestors long term.
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If chaos is the goal, that helps Trump. And that will NOT help these protestors long term.
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