Don't Mourn, Organize.
May Day reflections, thinking about the student protests.
For a few years, I had a ritual I'd perform back when I still lived in Chicago. On May 1st each year, I'd walk out of the office building that I was working in downtown and take the long route so I’d pass a specific spot, even though the offices and jobs changed from year to year. In one of these jobs, my assignment was to scan documents, save them to folders online, and stack them in a pile to the side. At one point, the stack was eight feet tall, and I sat next to a small pothos plant that never saw natural light. In one of these other jobs, I worked in the shell of an old department store that sat along the shore of the Chicago River. My job there was to wear a lab coat, look at plates of biopsies and vials of blood, and note in the computer what kind of cancer the patient had. At this company they had kombucha on tap, a full-service cafe, and a room that was for some inexplicable reason full of mint and basil plants. In all these jobs I was working minimum wage, right along the edge of the poverty line, and in none of these jobs did I ever have health insurance, let alone paid sick days. There was always the thought and the knowledge that this wasn't enough, that this was wrong, that it went against my politics but more importantly my basic human dignity.
And so each year on May 1st I'd walked to Halsted, either after work or during a long lunch break that I stole back for myself. At Halsted and Desplaines there's a large stone pedestal, with bronze figures rising from it with their arms lifted in defiance. The monument marks the spot of the Haymarket massacre on May 4th, 1886, when a bomb was hurled among a crowd of people protesting for the 8-hour workday. Cops were killed, activists were maimed, and in the aftermath the state rounded up the movement's leaders and tried them without evidence. The labor organizers were sentenced and hung on the gallows. It was beautiful, I thought. Sad, but beautiful. Martyrdom. There was some romantic, yearning part of me that thought standing next to places like this, epicenters of past struggle, could be enough, as if it would magically infuse me with the spirit of solidarity and the energy to break the chains in my own life. But there was always another aspect of my visits, a kind of romantic self-pity.
In early May the monument is covered with roses; bouquets, stems, red and black petals, little offerings to the dead Socialists and Anarchists. They’re fresh on Mayday, but by the next day, sitting without water and roots, they begin to die. I'd come back to visit the monument in the days and weeks afterward, and with each day the petals would unfurl in bloom, and then slowly peel away, back in on themselves, until the petals were the consistency of parchment paper and the head of the blossoms had curved inward. That was beautiful too, I thought, a reminder of nature, of things larger than us. But the roses were also a kind of political coping mechanism, a story that I told myself of politics.
There had been such a blossom of energy and hope at the beginning of those years. In early 2017 I had taken the train with thousands of others and crowded the airport terminals on the night of the Muslim Ban. The Trump administration, stunned by the protests, pulled back. It didn’t know what to do when thousands of people spontaneously occupied airports nationwide. The sterile, commercial, cold airport terminal was suddenly full of color and life; people cried, sang. Strangers reached for strangers and held one another close. You could feel hundreds and thousands of bonds being tied. Anything felt possible, it was like the whole world was being pried open. There was no telling whether this would be the end of it. Maybe the protests would go on, maybe they would storm other places; legislative halls, glass towers, police departments. It was like every cold and lifeless place could be transformed in an instant into something beautiful, accessible, and made for everyone. So many of us were transfixed by walls in those months, and how horrific they are, but it was clear in one night that the walls could be so fragile. Overcome with a wave of people, walls crumple like sand. There was no telling how long the wave could go, how far it would spread, but it was clear that something had transformed; not only in the world that the waves touched, but in the people that were part of it. We were different, by the end of it; not only more connected to the wider world but somehow more secure within ourselves, somehow communal but also individual. Powerful. For a brief moment, everyone was powerful.
The wave, of course, receded. The energy of that moment was diminished by the slow pace of bureaucracy, and inertia, and time, and the deliberately frustrating American political system. By a few months later, I had nearly forgotten it had happened. I had drifted back to the minutiae of underpaid work, and an island-like existence. Solidarity turned from a verb into a dusty ghost-like word that had lost its sharpness. I’d go to the Haymarket site and watch the roses, but all I could see was the slow decay, the dying off. I’d imagine a street cleaner, a worker, coming to the monument in late spring and shoveling the husks of the dead roses into the trash-bin. That’s where all this struggle for the beautiful idea went, I thought. The trash-bin of history.
Sometimes I have to be shaken awake a bit, and reminded that self-pity is a dead-end. Right now it’s the students protesting at campuses nationwide who are doing that, and thank heavens for them. As I’m writing now, hundreds of college campuses have had protests or spontaneous encampments directed at solidarity for Palestine and an end to the war in Gaza. Just yesterday, students at Columbia University in New York occupied Hamilton Hall, one of the school buildings on campus, and renamed it to Hind Hall in memory of Hind Rajab, a young child who was recently killed in an Israeli bombardment along with her mother. Last night hundreds of police officers entered the building and arrested the protestors. Hundreds more wore riot gear and emptied the encampments on the college lawn. This is a scene that’s being repeated across the country. As of this moment, over a thousand protestors nationwide have been arrested. Their crime is pitching a tent on the lawns of universities that they pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend. Many of these students are being suspended, and losing their livelihoods and housing as a result.
Students and faculty aren’t really being arrested for camping and shouting slogans; they’re being attacked for breaking the veneer of the university as an enlightened and morally progressive place. A clear example is with Columbia. The university’s administration has gone to such lengths to market itself as a progressive and diverse place, so much so that it actively highlights the militant student protests that occurred there in 1968 against the Vietnam War. They even make it clear in undergraduate admissions that they don’t discriminate against applicants who are disciplined for peaceful protests. Yet when actual anti-war demonstrations emerge again, in the same buildings that were occupied during the ’68 anti-war movement, the administration’s first move is to crack down violently. Not only has Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik actively invited the New York Police Department onto campus, she’s asked them to stay through most of the month, essentially leading to a police occupation of the campus. Don Moynihan was right when he wrote about the protests at the University of Texas; “The students in Austin should retain mementoes of their arrests for when the university runs a retrospective event applauding their courage decades from now.” Maybe, in thirty or forty years, Columbia University will proudly display blood-stained Keffiyehs from student protestors behind glass cases on campus.
This is all, of course, because of the war in Gaza and occupied Palestine. The numbers of killed and maimed in Palestine are rote, by this point, but they need to be repeated; more than 34,000 killed, 77,000 wounded. Roughly 70% of those killed are women and children, which does not even capture the thousands of innocent men not included in that category. Recently mass-graves have been discovered at multiple hospitals in Gaza; upwards of 400 and probably more bodies thrown into a ditch, their hands often bound by ropes and zip ties. Apparently, there’s evidence that some of these people were buried alive.
The chilling backdrop of the campus protests in the U.S. is that Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s higher education. All 12 universities in the Gaza Strip have been wrecked, and nearly 75% of all the educational infrastructure in Gaza had been damaged as of January, according to the UN. There’s no doubt that number is higher now. Israeli soldiers have been plundering antiquities and knowledge from the museums of these institutions. Three university presidents in Gaza have been killed, nearly 100 deans and professors killed, nearly 90,000 students have had to stop their studies because of the siege. But still American university presidents are cracking down on peaceful protestors, and their rationale is that these students are breaking protocol, or occasionally breaking a glass window or moving some benches. My god, they say, think of the broken windows and the loud shouting on campus! Meanwhile, more homes are being razed by Israeli bulldozers, and more babies are being killed for the mistake of being born on the wrong side of the occupation zone.
I’ve been thinking of a cliché quote, but a good cliché. The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, supposedly, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” A sick society, in this case, thinks that a person should put their head down, dutifully study and work, and forget all about the genocide occurring in the Holy Land, and especially forget that it’s American weapons, and American funding, that sustains the massacre. Arwa Mahdawi put it best in the Guardian; “If you want to get ahead in life then I have some advice: keep your mouth shut about Palestine.” That’s what a sick society does; tells you to shut up, to stop thinking. You would think that a college would be a refuge for free thinking, a place where the world could be examined thoughtfully and rationally and eventually challenged. But it’s clear that the administrators of these universities think that their institutions serve another purpose first and foremost; to keep the sick society going, whatever the cost.
These student protests should be seen as a rebellion against a sick society. It’s an act of beautiful desperation by a cohort of people who believe that their government and universities shouldn’t fund massacres. A lot of commentary will focus on the perceived naivete of these students. They will find ways to call them entitled, and superficial, and the Republican Party and the far-right will absolutely join in, because the right would love nothing more than to dismantle public higher education. But when the media backlash is placed within the context of what the protestors are asking for – an end to the war, an end to universities investing in weapons manufacturers and violent states – then it’s impossible to take this media coverage seriously. People by and large don’t want more war and violence. It’s only the Republicans calling for the deployment of the National Guard, and the police bull-rushing peaceful protestors, who want more violence. Maybe they’re the ones who are truly sick.
I’m hopeful, I suppose, if not apprehensive. Thousands of peaceful protestors are making themselves targets for police batons and tear-gas canisters. They’re joining a very long tradition of movements that have tried to make a sick world a little bit healthier. Lots of people will get hurt. Many more will be transformed. Perhaps the whole world will. Already there are beautiful images of thanks coming out of Gaza. One young person, Takfeer Abu-Yousuf, a displaced student in Northern Gaza, told CNN about the thank-you messages they wrote in Gaza to American students;
“Those are thank you messages on our tents, those tents that don’t protect us from the heat or cold. The least we can do is thank them. We can’t write these thank you messages on the walls of our homes because we have no homes. They have been destroyed on top of our children, elders, and women.”
There’s a phrase that I have always loved, brought up by Utah Phillips, a great folksinger who has now passed from the world. He used to talk about the idea of the ‘long memory’. The long memory is a historical record of regular people who have struggled to make the world better; union-organizers, suffragettes, civil-rights activists, everyone under the banner. Phillips said,
“Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go."
So many people over time have struggled for a better life, and amid such an unwell world it’s easy to think that the long memory is a thing of the past, a hope that was once alive but is now only a phantom. But the student protests show that the long memory is a malleable thing. It is soft, changing every moment, and they are not only tapping into the long memory but adding to it, writing their names and stories into record. Only with more help, more voices, will their hopes transcend memory. Will we show up and contribute our verse?