May day! May day!
We raised young people to believe that genocide was wrong. We told them they had the right to free speech and assembly. We told them that lots of wars were somehow not genocidal (pay no attention to the millions of dark-skinned corpses behind the curtain, children) and that those wars even somehow mysteriously created those rights to free speech and assembly. Now those young people are being attacked by police, beaten up by judeonazi brownshirts, and unceremoniously suspended from the debt machines of higher indoctrination. And nobody’s thanking these students for their service.
I admit that I get frustrated with these courageous and kind students. Why are they afraid of cameras? Don’t they know you need the corporate media to build a movement? Why do they seem to be more interested in using counterproductive chants than in stopping the war? Why do they embrace the label pro-Palestinian, when anti-genocide and pro-peace are readily available free of charge and without IDF and CNN endorsement?
But let’s stop and think for a minute. If we would all turn out to support the students prior to police brutality, or even prior to corporate media coverage, would those traditional elements in campaign building be needed? Why must we sit on our overfed rears until young people get knocked down and beaten by Nazis who possess such cultural immunity that nobody will print this now that I’ve called those thugs Nazis? Why, for that matter must we wait for students to be depicted as drooling anti-Semites in the corporate media before we go join them and show our support for peace? It’s no secret where they are. They’re on every college campus, and for the most part asking for support on social media.
Most students and damn near everyone else are not showing their faces at all. So, those students who are turning out to peace encampments but refusing to speak to anyone or be photographed are actually showing rare bravery. If we want to ask them for more, we can ask them for more, but not until we all show up and form a wall around them a thousand people thick! There are more than enough people within spitting distance of every campus who say they oppose genocide to do that, if we can just shake off the corporate media bewitchment.
That means, no cable news. None. Not the evil flavor and not the holy flavor. None of it. That means visiting campuses for multiple reasons. (1) to read some books, (2) to act with some newly acquired wisdom.
I recently visited a peace camp on a university campus. I saw an event where all were welcome, where not a single person threatened violence of any sort, where young people sat in a circle and used some of the practices popularized by Occupy, where students talked about the suffering of the people in Gaza. There was not a word of hatred or bigotry. There was nothing but a painful longing to put a halt to a public genocide, and perhaps a bit of relief to be able to say that in a gathering of people who agreed.
If you agree, you can help simply by making that gathering larger. The alternative is taking the side of death. A choice must be made by each of us. Silence is betrayal.