I began writing this just as a fairly good sized crowd was gathered on the Indiana University campus. They spilled out onto the streets and completely took over the intersection of Indiana and Kirkwood avenues. I’d been on my way to the Monroe County Public Library but had to divert because the campus police had barricaded both streets.
That was yesterday. I’d figured I’d be finished writing this thing within an hour or two. It turned out to take a day or two because…, well, because.
This Israel-Gaza War and the resultant college campus protests don’t lend themselves to easy answers or pat opinions. In fact, as far back as October, days after the Hamas raid that triggered the current mess, I wrote that I took neither side in it because both sides were assholes. Are assholes.
And by sides I mean the dudes who are giving orders to their minions to kill the minions “enemy” leaders have ordered to kill them. The innocents being displaced, the mothers and children starving and being killed and maimed, the victims of the original terrorist attack, the people mourning their dead, and the hostages who to this day remain in captivity — they’re not part of any side. They are, like so many hundreds of millions throughout the reign of Homo sapiens, casualties. Collateral damage. Unfortunate victims for whom we devote our thoughts and prayers. It’s too bad, really, but whaddya gonna do?
That’s war. The way it is now. The way it was last year and last century. The way it’s been for all of human history. The way it’ll be tomorrow.
I’ll settle here for a few random thoughts and pontifications. I can only hope smarter people than I am might correct me should they find that any of these observations are full of shit.
● I needed to return an overdue book to the library yesterday morning. 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution, by Robert C. Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne. How fitting. It’s a comprehensive recap of that dramatic, violent year when students were gathering in fairly good sized crowds on college campuses and spilling out onto surrounding streets. Among other horrors, Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy was killed. More than 160 United States cities went up in flames. Protesters took over the Columbia University campus. Chicago police rioted, beating protesters and bystanders senseless during the Democratic National Convention. White supremacist George Wallace was running for president and looking almost formidable. Tanks rolled into Prague. The Tet Offensive. Half a million US soldiers in Vietnam. And just as a reminder that we humans occasionally can do something wonderful, three NASA astronausts took a joy ride around the Moon.
2024 is no 1968. That doesn’t make it any less scary.
● Speaking of scary, I’ve always been frightened of crowds. When I was a kid, my father would occasionally get box seat tickets to the Cubs game from trucking companies who hoped to sweeten him up. He was a shipping and recieving foreman at a corrugated box manufacturer. Ironically, that was the same kind of job Archie Bunker had in the early ’70s sitcom, “All in the Family.” Dad would idolize Archie, which, I suppose, was not Norman Lear’s intent in creating that character.
Anyway, the crowds at Wrigley Field, scared me. The sounds. The emotion. Too much. The crowds could, I feared, steamroll me.
● What does that have to do with today’s events? Simple. Any crowd gathering, thinking the same thoughts, spouting the same slogans, scares me. As did the crowd at the IU campus, spilling out onto Kirkwood and Indiana avenues.
Ironically, I agree with a couple of their basic sentiments. Israel’s gone too far. Way, way too far. Not only that, Israel for 75 years to one extent or another has run its own version of Jim Crow, isolating, disempowering, dehumanizing, crushing a group of reviled people within its claimed borders.
But too many protesters seem to conveniently forget that Hamas, the other bad actor in this hellish scenario, would love to wipe Israelis and Middle East Jews off the face of the Earth as much as or more than the Netanyahu gang would like to do the same to Palestinians. Each side wants to commit genocide upon the other; only one has the means to do so right now.
Any comparisons between Hamas and America’s Blacks for hundreds of years or Europe’s Jews up to and including World War II fall short because neither of those reviled, isolated, disempowered, dehumanized, crushed parties wanted to return the favor to its oppressors.
● I read this morning that former Bloomington mayor John Hamilton visited the campus protesters yesterday at the encampment in Dunn Meadow. An Indiana Daily Student reporter wrote, “Hamilton said the Dunn Meadow encampment will play a part in what happens in Gaza.” Yeah, sure, I thought, Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces have been dying to find out what the college kids of Bloomington think. A friend of mine, after reading the line, responded simply, “Is he nuts?”
● Speaking of Bloomington mayors, current boss Kerry Thomson the other day released a video statement rambling on about free speech, peaceful protest, the threat of violence, and “unauthorized” encampments. The fallout was immediate. It was so negative that a day later she issued a statement in which she stepped back from her first utterance. Sorta. She’d stuck her hand into a hornets nest and got stung. She should have stayed away from it. Indiana University is essentially a sovereign mini-state within the city limits. It has its own police force and rules. When it cleared out the encampment, resulting in arrests of students and faculty, it called on the State Police for help. The City of Bloomington hjad nothing to do with the contretemps. Thomson should have kept her nose clean.
● The only way IU could have looked worse during this whole thing would have been if the cops had beaten the bejesus out of the protesters and/or opened fire on them. For pity’s sake, the semester’s about to end; why couldn’t the Whitten administration simply negotiate terms with the protesters, let them sleep overnight in their tents, and wait until people started going home for the summer? To make things immeasurably worse, those pix of a police sniper atop a building overlooking Dunn Meadow were horrifying.
Then again, horrifying is the wrong word. It should be reserved for what’s been happening to the innocent civilians of Gaza. Funny, isn’t it? The mostly White crowds protesting on college campuses have essentially turned all the attention away from Gaza and redirected it to themselves.
Meanwhile, the Israel-Gaza War goes on.