I’m ambivalent about campus protests. I think you have a first amendment right do demonstrate and say offensive things. But you don’t have the right to occupy campus spaces 24 hours a day, pitch tents, disrupt classes and menace other students. I also have no patience for the ones screaming the loudest for campus action, who have also been demanding that universities allow more free speech on campus and have been craven apologists for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Give me a break.
totally agree Nick. I was born in 1950 & well remember the Democrats Chicago convention, & then Kent state in 1970. expecting a group of people to constrain their emotions does not guarantee that
an opposing group will maintain restraint on their actions
I was tear·gassed at the Big DC anti·war March back·when. We were utterly committed to non-violence. (Four teachers from a boys' school in NH drove down together. As we left, the math teacher said he hoped we all got shot.)
My moment occurred at Cal in May of '70, after Nixon and HK decided to invade Cambodia from a safe distance. The profs had to hold classes, and I went to most all. (They were good fun classes.) For protest many of us made 'peace' posters, silkscreened onto the old computer paper with the perforations along the edge. Many others, alas--including true non-student 'rabble'--chose bouts of window smashing instead. Today, the news is the latest batch of peregrine falcon chicks hatching atop the Campanile, .. and the Sproul Hall frontage Pro-Palestine encampment, a truly odd juxta of establishment hauteur and homeless chic ..
Anyone recall the campus protests in the 1960s? Occupying the Dean's office at Columbia, for one - methinks the deal with campus protests is "adults" demand the student "children" behave and follow the adult-established rules set up to allow the "children" to (pay to!) be on the "adults"' playground, which is privately owned property - mob scenes in public places are viewed differently. Thus, one area has specific ground rules by which students have supposedly specifically agreed to abide, whereas the general public is, well, the General Public, overseen by and part of widely-interpreted standards of civilized behavior. Basically, it's largely because "adults" don't want to bother listening to younger people - the very ones being educated to think for themselves! - that such massive campus protests are necessary, or we may well still be fighting in VietNam, given its financial boon to "adults" at the expense (again! albeit differently) of the "children" . . . Campus anti-war protests are hugely different from mobs rioting to express personal opinions, to put it mildly; selfish "adults" tend to reframe anti-war protests in personal terms because such "adults" cannot imagine selfless behavior or caring.
These protests remind those of us who were alive and aware back then of the Vietnam protests on campuses and elsewhere. My parents (very conservative) thought the world was coming apart in the US. The difference between those protests and the current Gaza ones was the fact that our young men were being killed daily in an illegal war. Anyone remember hearing the daily body count every night from Walter Cronkite on the 6:00 pm news?
totally agree Nick. I was born in 1950 & well remember the Democrats Chicago convention, & then Kent state in 1970. expecting a group of people to constrain their emotions does not guarantee that
an opposing group will maintain restraint on their actions
You nailed it!!! Thank you
I was tear·gassed at the Big DC anti·war March back·when. We were utterly committed to non-violence. (Four teachers from a boys' school in NH drove down together. As we left, the math teacher said he hoped we all got shot.)
The Gops (rhyme fops) are succinctly revealed in this toon (as usual). YaY NA. https://nickanderson.substack.com/ #nick_anderson_
My moment occurred at Cal in May of '70, after Nixon and HK decided to invade Cambodia from a safe distance. The profs had to hold classes, and I went to most all. (They were good fun classes.) For protest many of us made 'peace' posters, silkscreened onto the old computer paper with the perforations along the edge. Many others, alas--including true non-student 'rabble'--chose bouts of window smashing instead. Today, the news is the latest batch of peregrine falcon chicks hatching atop the Campanile, .. and the Sproul Hall frontage Pro-Palestine encampment, a truly odd juxta of establishment hauteur and homeless chic ..
Anyone recall the campus protests in the 1960s? Occupying the Dean's office at Columbia, for one - methinks the deal with campus protests is "adults" demand the student "children" behave and follow the adult-established rules set up to allow the "children" to (pay to!) be on the "adults"' playground, which is privately owned property - mob scenes in public places are viewed differently. Thus, one area has specific ground rules by which students have supposedly specifically agreed to abide, whereas the general public is, well, the General Public, overseen by and part of widely-interpreted standards of civilized behavior. Basically, it's largely because "adults" don't want to bother listening to younger people - the very ones being educated to think for themselves! - that such massive campus protests are necessary, or we may well still be fighting in VietNam, given its financial boon to "adults" at the expense (again! albeit differently) of the "children" . . . Campus anti-war protests are hugely different from mobs rioting to express personal opinions, to put it mildly; selfish "adults" tend to reframe anti-war protests in personal terms because such "adults" cannot imagine selfless behavior or caring.
These protests remind those of us who were alive and aware back then of the Vietnam protests on campuses and elsewhere. My parents (very conservative) thought the world was coming apart in the US. The difference between those protests and the current Gaza ones was the fact that our young men were being killed daily in an illegal war. Anyone remember hearing the daily body count every night from Walter Cronkite on the 6:00 pm news?