9.27.2006

Movement? or not

Yesterday a speaker came to williams, Eban Goodstien, who spoke about an event called Focus the Nation, which is slated to take place over 16 months from now. It would be a day of speaking about, learning about, debating and making political voices known through a day of sort of official teach-ins. The topic? Global climate change and what the US isn't doing about it. The event is scheduled to occur nationally at over 1000 college campuses as well as other institutions, involving community groups, civic groups and businesses. Focus the Nation

He came to Williams to make a presentation, but his express purpose was to gain the commitment of the Williams community in taking a leadership role in organizing this far-off event. Once we (Justin and Alison and I) expressed some interest, his first question to us was this: is this type of mass movement possible at Williams?

Today I went into the archives to look up the background on the student protest of 1970 which culminated in a all-school meeting from 10pm till 1am in which the students voted to strike for two days. The next day the faculty voted to suspend classes for the remaining two weeks of the semester to allow Williams students to take the lead nationally in organizing college campuses and Washington rallies. According to a senior history thesis, for a short while Williams was the leader of the national college protest. This normally apolitical, status quo institution was transformed into a radical center of a political movement.

What allowed this to happen? First was the students returning from a rally in Yale to protest the recent actions of Nixon to promote the war. At a similar protest that same weekend, half-way accross the country, several students were shot and killed at Kent State. The experience of Yale and the catalyst of Kent allowed the student body to be swept up by this spontaneous strike movement, diving blindly into an adventure of opposing authority and political power.

The movement was organized overnight, lasted a few weeks, and by the end had deteriorated back to kids doing what they would anyway if they were stuck at school for weeks with no class - drinking, smoking, music, relaxing in the sun. And maybe we've learned something from this - that spontaneous mass movements aren't really the powerful and effective things they seemed at the time. Maybe this has to do with why the nation currently has such a dearth of visible and exciting protests. We're more cynical now, or at least we are led to believe that people in general are too cynical for that sort of thing.

So my question is this: can we organize a protest, a movement, a feeling even approaching that level in response to an issue, which if you take it seriously is more catastrophic than anything they imagined in 1970, an issue thatvirtually all the science says we must act now in order to avoid the worst? Is it possible to jolt, scare, cajole or beg people out of their lives for a moment for some constructive and mutually agreed upon goal? And can that all happen without it then turning into a cynical or fatalistic pursuit? Or has the ever stregthening forces of market-consumerism dulled us of the prospect of mass movements sparking ideological change? (the kind of change that cannot be marketed as trendy, the kind of change that needs more commitment than a checkbook.)

Its so easy to be pessimistic. Its so easy to say that this is unlikely, that there is no reason why this should be my job or your job or Williams' job. And there is no reason to say that it would have any meaningful effect even if it was to succeed.

But it just seems so much more boring to be pessimistic.

No comments: