The Only Fools Are The Powerful Who Refuse To Act
As the nation rises against the imperialist aspirations of our elected leadership, organizations who should be doing something remain absent.
Protestors marched on the New Mexico Democratic Party headquarters for Land Day and in response to Democrat’s pro-war policies regarding the occupation of Palestine.
As protests grow across the United States and the world in response to the ongoing genocidal actions of Israel and its Western backers, the silence of our leadership caste has not gone unnoticed here on the ground. In fact, despite months of outreach and marches across the country, our representatives have surrendered their power entirely, lending our voice to atrocity through a false mandate garnered via undemocratic processes.
Despite the promises of a “one-term presidency" from the Biden team and Democrats when they were begging for the youth, minority, and labor votes in 2020, today we have seen how they instead wish to simply betray those promises once more to further calcify their flagging power. And to be fair, when your politicians and legislators have all lived through and perpetrated dozens of wars and killed tens of millions over the last several decades, what is a broken promise to the People, and what is another four years?
Perhaps it is we who are the fools this year, the ones who are being dragged, kicking and screaming, through a false-democratic process with a potential genocidaire on one side and an active one and his enablers on the other. The Democratic Party, leaning as always – and as convenient – on the laurels of “tradition,” has decided that it will simply assume and accept the nomination of their one-term candidate despite the raging furor that lives within its own base at the simple thought of such an outcome.
The DNC, hiding behind the alleged intricacies of State election laws and institutional independence as an excuse for their malconduct and unresponsiveness, has decided that the incumbent-candidate is the de facto nominee for the party. This is despite the outrage that exists within every single office of the Democratic Party, the vast outflow of support from Progressive, Leftist, and Marginalized caucuses who have learned much about the true motivations of the supposedly “humanitarian” DNC. Look to New Mexico’s Representative Delegation and this could not be clearer, their backroad headquarters hiding and nearly unmarked on the edge Liberal Nob Hill and the impoverished “International District,” virtue-signaling and promising a better future while prioritizing the inflow of weapons and tech funding which will do nothing to enrich the lives of the average New Mexican but will take everything from innocents across the world.
The same can be said of the student Democrat organizations across the country who, despite clear outrage from their membership and peers, have done little more than try and distance themselves from their namesake institution; showing a level of fecklessness that mirrors that of the overarching Party that we all, whether justifiably or not, tie directly to any group of large “D” democrats. Was it not student Democrats and democratic student organizations that mobilized against the invasion of Vietnam, creating such a rift in the public relations capabilities of the Johnson administration as to force the withdrawal of the incumbent Democrat from the nominating contest entirely. Was it not these students who were willing to take the punishment on behalf of those who could not be heard otherwise?
Joining the Albuquerque-branch of the Party of Socialism and Liberation this weekend for Land Day, I saw the coalition-building taking place between organizations with diverse and, at first glance, different objectives and drives: organizations like UNM Kiva, Law Students Against Imperialism, and Students for Socialism; Samidoun, A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, the Peoples Housing Project, the African American Spiritual Association, NM Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, the ABQ Center for Peace & Justice, and Red Ant Collective; PSL, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, Green Party, and labor-union organizers. The capabilities and community-building between students and the off-campus world are developing in proportion to the universal demands of justice ringing across the world, their voices raised against the unslakeable bloodthirst and the continuation of policy that has killed members of their community consistently for more than 400 years. Many have had those memories relegated to our national history, the powers-that-be depersonalizing and abstracting murder and extraction into footnotes that can easily be parsed out as something long passed and, more importantly, foreign to contemporary sensibilities. Yet today, they see it once again; colonization and degradation flourishing in front of them and targeting some other People far away.
What I also learned was that the DSA and the Student Democrats were, once again, institutionally absent from a protest that was openly acknowledged and advertised across the campus. Despite press releases and assurances of their Progressive sensibilities and priorities over the last months, they could not be bothered to organize for those values on any notable level even as we marched on the Democratic Party Headquarters to demand change from our elected officials. While I am sure that members of the organizations were present, I am also sure that they are now questioning their ties to organizations who seem unable or unwilling to actually mobilize when the time to do so comes.
Let alone the missed opportunity at publicity, coalition-building, and distancing themselves from the synonymous Democratic Party that is actively taking their name for use in a coronation, these organizations are continuing to weaken themselves through their silence, passively endorsing the candidates and policies which their websites say they oppose and refusing to show up for the those they ostensibly represent in our political institutions both locally and nationally. In a movement that includes us all, there is no room for respectful silence, and it is incumbent upon those who have institutional power – whether real or just perceived – to utilize that in whatever ways have the largest effect.
Namely: on a march on the Democratic Party Headquarters, signs from Student Democrats would have been much harder to dismiss from those already seen as outside agitators such as Socialist, Muslim, and anti-war organizations.
Once more and for those in the back: If you are a member of these bodies, why is your leadership openly supportive yet conspicuously absent from the conversations happening on their very doorstep? Why do you lend support, yet when the march is on there is no organizational representation of your body? Maybe, the institutional power of student Democrats is so diffuse as to be nothing but show-dressing. Coincidentally, that is exactly what is required in this moment when PR and theater are the only means of piercing the veil of media genocide apologia.
Similarly, where are your student newspapers? How are events supported by dozens of local student organizations and which attract hundreds of supporters from off-campus going unreported? To my own alma mater’s Daily Lobo: have you become so completely spineless that you cannot even report on these events at all, the last coverage being almost two months ago despite the protests only growing since. They happen somewhere on campus every week, yet your last relevant article looks to the Regents and how these protests affected their day as your primary perspective; reporting the words of protestors from a removed vantage of objectivity and offering nothing by way of larger context, disconnecting your readers from the actions happening in their name and your institutional voice carrying water for atrocity via passive-voice-sanitization of the student body.
I have to ask, why? Is there no intellectual curiosity left in your offices? Are your readers, writers, photographers, and editors all absent from the discussion on Palestine and the impacts of colonialism on societies? Do none of you have any personal attachments to the atrocities that define not only our nation, but the deepest histories of New Mexico itself. In a land where we only need look back one, two, or three generations to see the active genocide of the Peoples that live here, many remembering the ethnic cleansing that swept this land until as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, we cannot ignore the atrocity happening to our international neighbors and fellows.
As a “news organization,” a place of primary information for students and which is designed to train the future reporters and journalists of our community, how do you justify the total lack of acknowledgement of your readers’ voice? Not even a poll? Just that some students protested and crashed a Board Meeting. How can I hear the words of students and their supporters, see the literal writing on the walls of campus and the city, yet you cannot? Frankly, if you are a student journalist, please tell me what makes these protests so insignificant to your organization and how you personally feel about the coverage or lack thereof.
To a point, I can understand the concept of the news-cycle as it applies to large organizations who cover news of every possible color and origin. I reject outright, however, that a student-run paper has any such considerations which would allow the active erasure of the student-led protests happening within literal sight and hearing of the Lobo’s front door on a weekly basis. It is time for student organizations to demand that their paper-of-record recognize the struggle happening both on- and off-campus for peace and freedom, to acknowledge the intersectional coalition which has built itself in response to the deaf ears of leadership.
The voices of New Mexico are growing louder and more impatient. The longer they are ignored, actively overridden and dismissed by our representatives and leaders, the worse things will get for the Democratic Party of New Mexico. As the Primary grows nearer, the demands to recall our Delegation become more insistent; if they survive the elections in June, they cannot count on November. The people will not be fooled forever and with every lie told, bomb dropped, or dollar stripped from our social services to uphold a disintegrating empire abroad, the entirety of the NM Democratic Party shows their true motivations and allies with terror over justice.
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