The Issue With University Today Is Not How Complicated Things Are, But How Incredibly Simple Everything Is.
At the center of every modern social movement, colleges and universities have historically met the times and spurred the nation onward. Often to their own peril.
Images of Mexico City Student Movement, October 1968; Héctor Gallardo
No matter where one looks, it is impossible to ignore the gaslighting of students across our college and university campuses; the greatest media and internet minds uniting once more in the goal of crushing the voices of concern arising from the youth vote nationwide. Where today Pro-Palestinian student protestors are simply wading into topics too complex for their developing minds, before it was Black Lives Matter. Before that it was the DREAMers and Occupy Wall Street. There was the invasion of Iraq, the NATO bombing of the Balkans, Proposition 187, Deaf President Now, Free Grenada, BDS, the Anti-Shah Movement; the Vietnam and Korean invasions; Kent State and Columbia University and North Carolina Ag & Tech and Fisk University. There are so many that it truly confounds the imagination, the list above being so scratch-the-surface as to already make me wish to continue adding to it. Undoubtedly, you have thought of one or two that you wish were included, some that hold a personal place in your memory and experience of a special time. I would love to hear about them.
The point is that students (read: young adults primed for knowledge and given generally free access to the world for the first time) are largely the most informed of us all. They have yet to become calcified by the societal contradictions in which they exist, having open minds cloistered in a first experience of solidarity on a university campus which, while sometimes tense, always provides a greater level of protection to the students than it does a threat. This is, of course, the reason that students are so readily able to organize against the glare of empire once the irradiation of the horrific acts begins to infect the soul, why they are able to quickly organize when an event the community recognizes as morally unambiguous takes hold of the communal motivations.
For it is undeniable that the more one learns of the atrocity upon which our sugared lives are built, the less able we are to be satisfied with the expectations set for citizens of the core: Get your STEM job, get it fast with no sidetracks; jump into white collar industry, somewhere with money like a bank, hedge fund, or tech developer; buy the things, be satisfied; don’t ask questions about Palestine or Ukraine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Jordan or Liberia or Somalia or Guatemala or Chile or Argentina or El Salvador or Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or the Philippines; forget forever the Susquehanna, Cherokee, Muskogee, Osage, Comanche, Crow, Nez Perce, Ute, Chumash, Apache, Pueblo, and Navajo.
How can a student of any intellectual curiosity, empathy, and sense of purpose ignore names and histories such as these? How could a place where survivors of every place above will naturally meet and exchange lead to anything but a fundamental rejection of the notion that a white-bread life could be satisfactory in a world so unjust?And so the empire must turn inward, looking within itself for the nagging itch that is simultaneously contained on small campuses and spreading like contagion to every corner where students might go for the holidays and breaks. Something must be done to stop the destabilization growing in its central colonies.
Tying in my morning reading: Caitlin Johnstone’s The Empire Slowly Suffocates Assange Like It Slowly Suffocates All Its Enemies illustrates the insidious methods by which large, old empires consolidate power as they sunset, using the power, people, and history they have conglomerated to slow-burn; a massive boa constrictor, always content to use patience rather than expend real energy.
Personally – and call me nerd if you must – I prefer a great slumbering dragon with centuries of fat to lose to the boa-constrictor Johnstone uses. The United States might prefer slow restriction and smothering of its problems, but the capabilities of blasting fire (even if through another’s mouth) are still all too real for millions living under the wings of the empire; the lives of Palestinians and Yemenis; Lebanese, Ukrainian, and Russians; Brazilians, Guatemalans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, and Mexicans; all feeling the brutality of US arms as we continue to develop, export, and profit off of these weapons.
The US and the sycophants who support the teetering ideology of the settler-colonial nation-state work tirelessly to smother student protestors, going to outrageous lengths from limiting what are acceptable ways to protest to closing organizations to pressing charges originally instituted against the KKK to undermine those who are deemed too contrarian to the Obama-era idea of what college is about.
And what happens when smothering isn’t enough? When the students won’t stop sitting at the wrong counter, drinking from the wrong fountain, riding the wrong bus, listening to the wrong speakers, reading the wrong books, following the wrong movements, taking the wrong classes. What happens when they won’t stop talking, not just to one another, but to everyone, everywhere.
With police in essentially every classroom in the United States at this point, we are more primed for the boa to bare the fangs, the dragon to unfurl its wings, the empire to crush its internally occupied Peoples with steel and fire.
Just ask Kent State, Orangeburg, or Tlatelolco. Ask the Freedom Riders, the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, or El Centro de la Raza.
Photo: Héctor Gallardo, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Read: Johnstone, Caitlin. “The Empire Slowly Suffocates Assange Like It Slowly Suffocates All Its Enemies.” Https://Substack.Com/@caitlinjohnstone, Caitlin’s Newsletter, 26 Mar. 2024, www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-empire-slowly-suffocates-assange.
