The Kids Who Took Over Campus

From the river to the sea, how can I make this about me?

A child’s first taste of power comes from their imagination. 

In the real world, they can't choose their bedtime or operate heavy machinery or eat unlimited ice cream. But in imagination-land, they can host tea parties and perform lavish makeovers and pilot rockets into outer space. 

Tricycles become race cars, broken twigs become magic wands, the floor becomes lava. And best of all, the grownups play along! 

We know there’s no tea in the teacups, we know their spaceships are made from cardboard, we know they lack the fine motor skills to hide the bags under our eyes, but we still drink their imaginary tea and swoon at their artlessly applied makeup and join them on their imaginary adventures.

Heck, we’ll even fire schoolteachers for telling kids that Santa isn’t real.

We instinctively want children to enjoy a world where they make the rules. At least for a while. Because one day, inevitably, they'll have to grow up. 

Sadly, by the time kids get to college, imagination-land doesn’t offer much power. But as some students are figuring out, there’s an alternative.

After all, in the real world, kids don't decide whether they pass or fail, they don’t control their college's investment practices or set U.S. foreign policy.

But in protest land, you can demand a passing grade when the havoc you’re causing on campus leaves you “unable to focus.” You can command your college president to “fold to [your] demands.” You can even dictate where your fellow students can and can't go on campus. 

And best of all, if anyone refuses to play along, you can make imaginary allegations. 

Students who disagree with you become “agitators,” and “stochastic terrorists,” the hand-delivered catering you’re demanding from your Ivy-League college becomes “humanitarian aid,” the students who are practising their equally legitimate right to protest are “waving bananas around like settlers waving machine guns.”

As long as you’re shameless enough to say it with a straight face, hyperbole and disingenuousness can also be paths to power. 

The problem is, no one seems to be asking how any of this bullying and dishonesty stops a single bomb from killing children in Gaza or a single bullet from killing innocent people in the West Bank. How does it free the hostages? How serious are these kids about the cause they claim they’re fighting for?

And a little over a week ago, we got our answer.

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who’s been supporting the Palestinian cause since before these students were born, suggested that they drop, or at least change, their infamous chant, “From the river to the sea.” 

He argued that slogans like these can easily be interpreted as a call for Israel's destruction instead of for Palestinian independence. And with the eyes of the world watching, with the lives of the Palestinian people at stake, this small change could make a meaningful difference:

...if you’re saying to me I’m a killjoy by saying that if we modify the slogan a little it’s not as much fun, I kind of get that. However, I do believe one has to exercise, […] if for no other reason than for the people of Gaza, one has to exercise maximum responsibility. 

Maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question, ‘What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?’

And here, at last, the students showed their maturity. They put their egos aside, chose meaningful discourse over a “fun” slogan, and agreed to speak in a way that would bring people together instead of driving them apart.

Just kidding.

That killjoy barely had time to finish speaking before they started chanting, “From the river to the sea.” 

Maybe it’s that same instinct to humour children’s efforts, but there’s this strange notion that all protests are “valid.”

That it’s impossible for the self-declared “right side of history” to hurt their cause. That it’s mean, or worse, boomer-esque, to ask how a specific plan of activism will lead to results.

And so, as a student at UCLA explains. we end up with activists who never learn to think beyond the next thing they’re going to “tear down”:

…it’s more than divestment […] given that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the UC system…

But to be very clear, I don’t blame the protestors for this. 

It’s the grownups’ job to set boundaries and structure. To help children think about the world in nuanced and constructive terms. To show them, preferably by example, that there’s a better way to communicate than name-calling and absolutism.

Because, sure, it’s fun to yell and grandstand and chant edgy slogans. It’s empowering to turn complex international issues into your personal hero’s journey. It’s tempting to claim that everybody who disagrees with you is cruel or stupid or out of touch.

But one day, if you want to make the world a better place, you have to grow up.

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