On Tuesday night I was making the security line at Miami International Airport, a place where hope goes to die, when I looked down (I had a lot of time to kill) and saw a faded strip of duct tape under my feet. As the man in line behind me continued to display a stunning lack of spatial awareness with every bump of his suitcase against the back of my legs, I thought fondly back to social distancing and the other public health guidelines ever-so-briefly in place to quell the spread of that pesky pandemic.
The guidelines, of course, have been nothing but a remnant for years now, even though at least hundreds (often thousands) of people in the United States are still dying of COVID-19 every week. And sure, the vast majority of those casualties are the elderly and immunocompromised folks. But so what? Do the elderly and immunocompromised not deserve our solidarity? Do they not deserve to get on a plane without fear that the passenger next to them will be ill and unmasked, thus putting them at risk?
I do not claim to be exemplary and this is not meant to be preachy so please don’t interpret it as such, but when I see elderly people at an event, or when my friends who are immunocompromised tell me how nervous they get about attending crowded places, I see it as an objectively very minimal sacrifice to put on a mask. But we've been taught to believe that the small things we can do for others are worth less than the minor inconvenience it takes to do them.
This lack of community and solidarity, made worse by regulations that encourage individualism above all, bleeds into other areas of life.
We're seeing it in some people's reactions to the student protests that have rapidly grown around the country — protests that ask university administrations to divest (or even to entertain a vote to divest) from a state and from companies who facilitate and are complicit in the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Today's students are using tactics previously used in those against the Vietnam War and against South Africa's apartheid regime. Today's demonstrations just haven't been ratified by time yet.
When I got on my flight, I purchased glacial Wifi (A*erican A*rlines, you will not walk past the pearly gates) to listen to WKCR, Columbia University's radio station run by student journalists.
On Tuesday night, they were reporting live from the scene at Columbia's campus, where the same president who unironically wrote a book titled WHAT WE OWE EACH OTHER: A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT had called in the NYPD to remove students from an occupied building (Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind's Hall by protesters in memory of a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed earlier this year in Gaza) and dismantle the student encampment.
Needless to say, the NYPD gleefully delivered, hundreds of them showing up in riot gear with all the military toys an $11 billion police budget allows. Just a few blocks up at City College, the NYPD did the same. In total, they arrested hundreds of protesters and injured at least three demonstrators. At Columbia, one cop even “accidentally” fired a gun inside Hamilton Hall, where no media or legal observers were allowed in.
Instead of expressing solidarity with unarmed and largely peaceful student protesters and the thousands of faculty members around the country who have joined them, I have seen hordes of people — many of whom have remained silent as for months we Americans have continued to fund the annihilation of Gaza — rise up to defend the actions of police departments across campuses.
Chilling, when we consider the trends: last year, police killed the highest number of people on record, and those victims were disproportionately young, Black and Latinx. When I see people defend a heightened police presence on college campuses, to me it heavily suggests that they care more about property than they do student safety.
As a reminder before the inevitable comment about Buildings comes up: trespassing and the occupation of (heavily insured, mind you) buildings are non-violent offenses and are tactics of civil disobedience that have been used repeatedly in protest movements throughout history.
It's just that time works as the great middleman — in a few years, maybe even decades, the same people that today shared their support for the universities risking students' safety to protect property and the illusion of neutrality will unironically share a graphic about the Brave Student Protesters of 2024. We've seen it before.
Columbia might even add it to the website.
Yesterday the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project (ACLED) released a report, which I first saw reported on The Guardian, showing that over 99% of student protests since October have been peaceful. Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Sunrise Movement, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, and Showing Up for Racial Justice have been supporting these protests — indeed, we don’t have to agree with every slogan and every chant, but we are seeing diverse and broad coalitions of students coming together to call attention to an injustice in which their universities are complicit.
What could be more natural on a college campus?
And yet, it has been heartwrenching, in the face of so much senseless death, to observe the limitations of some people's humanity and solidarity. Because I know, for instance, that many of the folks now crying out for law and order in college campuses probably uploaded a little black square onto Instagram back in 2020; maybe they even briefly added a cheeky "#BLM" to their bios. A tiny fist emoji, too — power to the people (for a little bit and so long as nothing really changes). All of it performative, yes, but a performance of solidarity does at least tell me that the actor in question knows what the right play is — when an audience is watching.
But I suppose all performances must eventually end.
Was police brutality, to these folks, condemnable solely because we happened to live under a Republican administration when George Floyd was murdered? If police brutality and state violence exist under a Democratic president, Democratic governor, Democratic mayor, and Democratic senators and representatives, are they suddenly unobjectionable? Does a call for law and order suddenly cease to be a dog whistle when it is uttered by a Democratic president? It sure seems like it to some people.
Below, a few of President Biden's remarks on the protests, delivered on May 2:
But — but neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society, and order must prevail.
Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.
Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.
The argument that "dissent must never lead to disorder" is wild: historically, dissent that leads to disorder has been the only kind that makes a difference (we can look at the very founding of this country, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests ... the list is illustrious and it is lengthy and it would be longer were it not for the growing power of the police state).
For some, solidarity has an expiration date, and it is a destabilizing thing to witness whether it comes in the shape of public health or protest movements.
To watch university presidents whose supposed calling is education call upon the police, many in riot gear, some deploying tear gas, some beating and arresting students in the middle of the night, some slamming elderly professors to the ground, some using tasers on students, some firing rubber bullets directly at protesters, and all using excessive and disproportionate force, in the name of order, feels like some sort of joke. To hear people defend these actions and cheer for this crackdown of non-violent protest (over mass death made possible with American funds) feels like a nightmare.
It didn’t have to come to this. A few institutions have understood that protests and demonstrations are commonplace and expected at universities — Wesleyan University has allowed the student encampment to remain, and at Brown University, the encampment was disbanded after the administration agreed to hold divestment to a vote.
Day after day after day for months, we have been witnessing Palestinians getting blown to bits, their hospitals demolished, children starving to death, mass graves discovered, universities destroyed, all with bombs our tax dollars pay for. Students are using their platform and their community, which is the power they have, to demand better from the institutions to which they give their time and money. And instead of listening to the youth, to whom the future belongs, politicians have chosen to vilify them and university administrators have chosen to call the cops on them. It's a shame.
Thank you for reading! As always, you can find me on twitter, instagram, and tiktok. This newsletter is my pride and joy, with issues on topics like the celebrity apology industrial complex, Barbie’s Oscar noms, debriefing the Bezos’ fake normalcy, the week when everyone was deranged, and Stanley cups and hyperconsumerism.
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"But we've been taught to believe that the small things we can do for others are worth less than the minor inconvenience it takes to do them." This is LOUD, Clara!
What I have come to understand in talking with my neighbors is that many people simply believe that the reason for the protest is illegitimate. I was talking to a neighbor of mine and compared the issue to the Kent State protest, and she said, “But we were protesting our friends and family getting shipped out an killed. This is not that.” And it was disappointing to remember yet again how often people do not consider an issue legitimate if it doesn’t affect them directly. “