Putting Logic To Rest
Sam Wechsler, ’08, is a soft-spoken person. You’d be surprised to learn that, at his command, is an organization that I have previously described as being the most dangerous near-paramilitary group on campus, the Progressive Student Alliance. The PSA, known for their occasionally fringe-level activism, is planning to march a mock wooden coffin from the Maginnes political science building to the Stabler Observation Tower at Iacocca Hall, to symbolize the cumulative American and Iraqi death toll, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Naturally, I was drawn to such a story. A coffin? Clearly, the symbolism made sense, but why even bother? Protests, like many long-standing traditions of the American left, have a habit of getting out of hand. Motives start innocently enough, but the consequences are what make front-page news. My concern centers around the fact that the consequences aren’t typically rally cries of support or newfound unity in a cause. Rather, someone typically gets hit with too much tear gas, or the fire hose pressure is a bit too high, and someone screams another classic battle cry of the militant left, hate crime!
What I found to be most refreshing was Wechsler’s attitude toward the whole affair. Rather than galvanizing himself in a position, donning the classic pin collection of upside-down American flags and other anti-establishment paraphernalia, and calling for direct and immediate action, he stated that, “Things take time. Up and out might not be the best strategy for pulling out of Iraq. Ending a war takes time, beginning a war takes time. What our goal is is to symbolize casualties that happened throughout the occupation of Iraq.”
So, why bother with the coffin? “It’s not like it’s completely like, gory. I don’t think it would be that shocking. It’s to bring back awareness,” said Wechsler. “…when people see the actions of others doing things like this, then they may want to participate in it themselves. And eventually you …get more people to participate, and it’s kind of a snowball effect, and that’ll carry – it can carry, all the way to the White House or Washington or whatever,” said Wechsler.
Aside from my immediate apprehension with regard to the notion of anything the left produces “snowballing,” the truth is that a coffin is nothing that the generation of overtly sexualized music and blood-smeared profane television and film couldn’t handle.
Though, if it were merely the act of a funeral procession that concerned me, there would be very little to be concerned about at all. The left would be supportive, and the right would be critical, and neither would likely incur any pragmatic visionary degree of change. Rather, such an act would merely bolster the confidences of both sides of whatever factor of the Iraq war is brought to question.
While I’d like to believe that such a march could remain peaceful, factors that Wechsler clarified lead me to muse otherwise. “We haven’t really planned dress or chants. That might happen; that might not happen. I don’t know,” said Wechsler. Such planned facets could drastically alter the nature of such an event, if properly leveraged. Yet again, my fear of discreet PSA uprising was quelled, when I began to draw comparisons to the ill-fated Diversity Signs project, which was deployed onto the lawn of the University Center last spring.
These signs, with phrases such as, “She looks like a whore,” and “You reek of Jew,” aside from crafting new bigotry that I never believed to be possible (how does one “reek” of Jew?), really only highlighted the overemphasis on false diversity that certain members of the community have been trying to push on the student body for several years now. Likewise, such a project was visually offensive, and likely distraught the visitors, one of which remarked that such signs only heighten the likelihood of latent anti-Semitism.
Said Wechsler, “They certainly invoke thought, and that’s one of our goals – to invoke thought in a person. They would probably be about as effective, however, we’re not writing things like ‘whore’ or ‘Jew,’” I followed up with the obvious: was he offended? “I was not offended by them, no,” noted Wechsler. “It depends on the people that are coming it see it, there are people who might be offended, and there are those who might think it’s funny. I would not support it if someone was seriously offended by it. If there were people that would go to whoever created it, and [the protesting group] kept it up, I would not support that. However, if people just see it and think it’s interesting and it provokes thought, then I think that it may be appropriate to do something like that. So, that’s – I guess there’s a thin line there.”
After speaking with Wechsler, I’ve come to the conclusion that he, like his organization, remains classically left of center. Motives or beliefs about the end of the Iraq War aside, his use of the verb “occupation” to describe the U.S. military presence in Iraq is disheartening and subjective. Likewise, I still cannot completely comprehend the logic of marching around campus with a coffin – I see it as being gently playful, almost absurd. It’s the sort of thing that one sees in bad music-television adaptations, and while I see his symbolism and his logic behind the mentality driving the coffin protest to fruition, I’m struck by the fact that students participating in this march, or witness to this march may not entirely find this demonstration very innocent, or may be offended, had they recently lost a loved one in Iraq. They may even see it as I do, and find it mildly amusing.
Protests are a holdover from the primitive student activism of the nineteen sixties. Even Wechsler agrees, stating, “A lot has changed since then, too, especially with the advent of the internet. Maybe some of those things don’t work so well.” Wechsler isn’t quick to make any draws between Vietnam and Iraq, which I find to be both admirable and intelligent, nor was he quick to exploit any of my questions for the purpose of furthering some browbeaten, oft-dismissed, debatable point of contention, such as the questions underlying the initial invasion of Iraq.
In my considerations, protests have never had a very high level of admiration. We have the God-given gifts of speech, of reason, and of basic communication skills. As a child, if you weren’t satisfied with the way that things went, and you approached your guardians, were you more successful when you articulated your grievances in a rational, calm manner, or when you threw things at them and yelled over top of them in a futile attempt to impose your will upon them?
The highest irony that I see is that liberals gush for protests because they see it as the apex of a means to an end. Yet, in reality, the large-scale government wrapped like a Christmas present in red tape and inaccessible to the common man is the very product that they seek to create. They won’t say this outright, but by undertaking the responsibilities of medicine, or law, or in the case of Pennsylvania, the liquor control board (and an entire market share monopolized with no reason), the government will consistently find a way to bungle management and alienate the aforementioned common man by their usurpation of power in a particular industry.
Furthermore, protesters often point fingers at the radical marches of the 1960s. They state that the civil rights movement would never have occurred, had protesters not marched upon Washington and Selma and Montgomery, and anywhere else that we’ve had branded on our frontal lobes by the American left during our primary school “social studies” courses. I truly do not believe that racism is overcome by demonstrations. Consider that the American Asian population has incurred much of the same denigration that the American Hispanic and African-American population has similarly encountered. Yet, we have very few examples of Asian uprisings in boroughs of New York City and otherwise. Why? I believe that this fact is explained by culture. The Asian population had it right – wait it out, let it pass, and prove the inequities of bigotry by behaving in a manner that has more, not less class than the elite who disenfranchise them.
People have a natural aversion to the appropriate channels of communication. They have predefined notions of the way the system should work, and when they encounter a single roadblock, they chalk this up to rationalize a protest. Ultimately, protests hinder progress, impede other neutral entities’ abilities to carry on their lives, and anger those whose lives are disrupted by them.
This planned protest seems manageable enough, particularly when contrasted to some of the direct activism that takes place at universities such as Columbia, Emerson, or Vassar. Yet, as stated before, it’s not the message that makes it into the news; it’s the consequences of that message. Will Lehigh embrace reason, or bury it altogether?
