It is no exaggeration to say that if one of these wanna-be protesters was transported back in time, they would run screaming for the present in less than five minutes, seeking whatever safe space they could find because there were none back then.
As anti-Israel if not outright antisemitic protests sweep major college campuses, the media and many of the students have been happy to relive the glory days of the 1960s. “We saw the student movement win in 1968. We saw the student movement win again with Columbia’s divestment from apartheid South Africa. And we know that the student movement will win again today,” explained Columbia grad-student Catherine Elias before the university called in the NYPD to clear the illegal encampment. The New York Times seems to agree, claiming that “The war in Vietnam ignited a protest movement that helped define a generation,” and asking “Is the war between Israel and Hamas doing the same thing?” last December. In their view, “to many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels to the Gaza protests are compelling: a powerful military raining aerial destruction on a small, underdeveloped nonwhite land; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; a sense that the war represented far broader political and cultural currents; an unswerving confidence — critics might say sanctimony — among students that their cause is righteous.” “When I hear Palestinians making comparisons to Vietnam and the role of the U.S. and colonialism, it’s really striking for me, and it’s a really poignant connection,” explained Loan Tran, a 28-year old Vietnamese American and director of Rising Majority, a leftist advocacy group. “I feel it in my body, and a lot of people in our Vietnamese community feel it in our bodies, to be resisting war, to be resisting occupation.” To their credit, the Times does acknowledge the obvious differences, starting with the fact this war began with an unprovoked massacre of innocent civilians, and quotes several critics of the protests, but the overall message is clear and if nothing else, the students themselves believe they are the inheritors of the flame – that is until they actually face consequences for their civil disobedience. Then, the entire world is out to get them and everything is suddenly unfair, rigged against the poor dears.
Progressive Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s daughter, a student at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College is a prime example. The 21-year old junior was happy to partake in the self described “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia, believing it was her right to literally set up tents in public spaces, disrupt education for her fellow students, intimidate some of those fellow students, and generally do whatever she pleases as a “long time social justice activist” according to Teen Vogue, but after she defied the school’s order to clear the space they were occupying and was arrested, she began to sound like a whining child, a spoiled brat if you will rather than the warrior she claims to be. Prior to her arrest and suspension from school, she described the scene, complete with a professor from the 1968 protest movement. “It was a really beautiful community space; so many people providing donations, food, blankets. We had such an amazing crowd come and join us Wednesday night, which was so powerful and also made the camp feel stronger. We had had a very core group of folks who understood the risks, and then having that number grow alleviated a lot of our stress. We felt like we weren’t alone.” Though the school provided notice that the encampment needed to disperse for obvious reasons and the students refused to do so, the young progressive seemed confused about the nature of the situation she helped create. It was shocking to her that setting up tents in an authorized space right in the middle of campus might be a problem, claiming “so I don’t really know how we were disrupting campus life. I think that those are misrepresentations. The university’s president has been trying to state that this is a massive disruption, rather than what I would say is a community building space.” Yes, a community building space where the school just happens to hold their upcoming graduation ceremony and from which they were told to vacate. That they were told to vacate or face the consequences was so clear to all involved that she admitted making an announcement about it at the encampment itself, to “let them know that we had been basically evicted and not allowed into our space, but also officially suspended.” They, however, chose to stay and were subsequently arrested and suspended, as promised. As a result, she was denied entry to the student dorms and use of her meal plan, prompting the daughter of a Congresswoman to claim she might have to sleep on the streets or starve. “I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my shit is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible.” She continued to lament, “I don’t know when I can go home, and I don’t know if I ever will be able to. I haven’t formally been evicted. I haven’t been sent a ‘move out’ email, but they’ve just said that I can’t get in, whatever that means. I have like four shirts, two pairs of pants…I cannot go to the dining hall. I sent them an email like, ‘Hey, I rely on campus for my meals, I rely on my dining plan,’ and they were like, Oh, you can come pick up a prepackaged bag of food, a full 48 hours after I was suspended. There was no food support, no nothing.”
Supposedly, we are to believe that the daughter of a Congresswoman can’t purchase a meal on her own in New York City. It would be embarrassing – both her whining and the way Teen Vogue and other outlets fawned over this nonsense – if it were not so funny and completely misguided. If this is truly the legacy of the 1960’s, the protestors of that era would be ashamed of what their movement has descended into. The whole point of civil disobedience is to use the fact that you are intentionally disobeying the law to call attention to your actions and the issues even as you face the consequences, arguably because you willingly face the consequences. As ScienceDirect describes it, “The participants in civil disobedience willfully and openly refuse to comply with a law in order to dramatize the issue that they, or the group, find unjust. An example of civil disobedience would be an environmentalist blocking a logging road and thus preventing the passage of logging trucks loaded with timber, when the logging company has obtained a court injunction prohibiting blocking the road. Civil disobedience differs from other illegal acts because it is engaged in by people who commit the action knowing and accepting the penalties and consequences of breaking the law.” Perhaps the most famous instance of civil disobedience in the United States was legendary civil rights icon Rosa Parks. On December 5, 1955, she refused to comply with the racist practice of forcing black people to sit on the back of the bus and she did so fully knowing she would be arrested and charged. Recalling the incident years later, Ms. Parks said, “When [the bus driver, who incidentally had left her standing in the rain more than a decade earlier] saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’” When the police arrived, she asked “Why do you push us around?” He replied, “I don’t know, but the law’s the law, and you’re under arrest.” Ms. Parks said later, “I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind…” She also rejected claims that she was simply tired or old and unaware of the consequences of her actions, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” While she readily admitted she didn’t wake up that morning planning to get arrested, she was fully aware of the consequences, “I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.” The result was national attention and a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama bus system that lasted for 381 days while her case worked through the courts. Ultimately, the Supreme Court was forced to weigh in and the city was forced to repeal the segregation law in question.
This is what civil disobedience means, and it played out similarly at Columbia itself in 1968, when students gathered to protest the Vietnam War in what was originally described as a “carnivalesque quality.” As happened recently, the protests expanded into the occupation of five buildings on campus and, even more extreme, a dean was briefly taken hostage, until the university president at the time, Grayson L. Kirk, called in the New York City Tactical Police Force. They arrived in force for greater than any current incident, some 1,000 officers armed with nightsticks, many mounted on horseback, some with the intent to harm these upstart kids as they saw them. One building was cleared without incident, but others resisted. As Barnard Magazine described it, “In Hamilton Hall, the first to be cleared, the arrests proceeded peacefully, in large part because the students had political officials on the outside negotiating on their behalf. These allies opened lines of communication between the students and police commissioner. Together, they agreed that if the University sent in the police, the students would not resist arrest but rather would walk out peacefully…In other buildings, the story was different. There were no advance negotiations, no agreements about resisting arrest. Some did walk out. Others locked arms in peaceful resistance. And a few fought back. The police, all white this time, broke down doors and made their way through the furniture barricades. Perhaps resentful of the students for the privileges the officers never had, they used their flashlights and night sticks liberally.” There were 100 injuries, pictures show students bloody and beaten, and over 700 arrests, primarily for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Susan Krupnick Fischer from the class of ’68 was outside the buildings at the time, hoping to “protect the protestors from the police. How innocent and naïve we were,” she recalls. “The police came, saw us, clubbed and threw us around, arrested those who weren’t fast enough to run away.” The aggressiveness of the police backfired, however, and prompted more protests – even though the protesters were fully aware what they were risking after they’d already been beaten. Elizabeth Langer, also from the class of ‘68, described it as a “transformative moment,” and was proud that she “had taken a stand and crossed a line.” The protests redoubled in the aftermath, grew larger, and even featured the Grateful Dead. There was no whining in the aftermath because these students – though I may disagree with them in principle in practice – knew what they were doing and were unafraid to face the consequences of their actions. To them, these protests weren’t a “community building exercise” or a “safe space” as The Washington Post recently described it.
For better or worse, it should also go without saying that much of what passed for acceptable behavior in 1968 is frowned upon in today’s safety-first society. The drinking age in New York was 18 at the time. Smoking was permitted in hospitals and on planes. There were no seatbelt laws, and drunk driving was considered a minor offense for which you received a simple ticket. Fire codes were also vastly different with far more people permitted to gather in public spaces and far less attention paid to the ability to enter and exit. Crowd safety was only a minimal concern. Microaggressions, outright aggressive behavior, confrontations, and conflict were far more rampant. The language coarser, what is now considered unacceptable discourse regarding race and gender was commonplace. This is not to suggest the changes since then have not been for the better – most of them obviously have been – but it is not an exaggeration to say that if one of these wanna-be protesters in 2024 was transported back in time 60 years, they would run screaming for the present in less than five minutes, seeking whatever safe space they could find because there were none back then. These self-entitled, wealthy, wannabes couldn’t handle the 1980s or even the 1990s either. I was at the Woodstock Redux in 1994. It was borderline savage even to an eighteen year old. The 1960’s incarnation must’ve been a barbarian horde, and supposedly we have progressed from that less enlightened era, becoming more aware of each other, our feelings, and a society based on mutual respect, but somehow we’re supposed to ignore the impact on the other students who simply want to go to class in peace and be left alone. Their parents are spending close to $100,000 per year for them to get the best education possible, and what does Columbia do because they cannot maintain order on their own campus? End in person classes and go back to virtual, because that worked so well, as if we needed any more evidence that academia is hopeless corrupt and needs to be defunded. Imagine being the parent of a student, much less a Jewish student, spending this kind of money so your child cannot go to class because a subset of their classmates thinks they’re living in 1968. In a rational world, the lawsuits would be flying and refunds would be demanded, but ultimately it is very difficult to blame the protesting students themselves. Like most young people these days, they have been raised in a fantasy land. This group has been influenced by those that have idolized the 1960s, desperate to relive their own glory days, and told their generation must take up some cause, however misguided. The reality of the 1960s, however, is far different and darker. There is a legacy of protest, yes, but it was also a decade that saw the assassination of a President, a Presidential candidate, and key civil rights leaders. There were bloody riots, brutal beatdowns by the police, and unrest on a scale we have not seen since. From the perspective of a modern day social justice warrior armed with social media, it might as well have been the dark ages, something closer to combat to the death in some Roman Colosseum. Anyone who truly wants to bring that back, is smoking something stronger than they had back then.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 