The news thrilled gray-haired rebels nostalgic for the radical ’60s: College students were protesting again.
Headlines harkened to the days when every campus had a conscience, when candlelight vigils, sit-ins and walk-outs were as much a part of academic life as literature and Earth science. News reports evoked memories of young people in work shirts and khakis, wearing peace signs, making the peace sign, crying out that war is unhealthy to children and other living things, marching for civil rights.
Members of Generation X, who had begun to despair that Wall Street had replaced Haight Street smiled at the pictures of students standing up for the rights of the citizenry, agitating for a better tomorrow.
It was happening at Michigan State University, at Washington State University and at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State College.
Angry young men and women assembled and raised their voices in protest. Police were called in to quell their fury. Thirty years fell away as familiar scenes played out once again.
You could almost smell the burning draft cards.
What was disturbing these bright young minds? Perhaps it was America’s continued forebearance of human-rights violations in China. Or failure to once and for all ensure peace in the Middle East. Or the administration’s reluctance to ban the use of land mines.
But when the TV pictures came into focus, reality was disheartening.
In East Lansing, Mich., 3,000 bright young minds were bummed out not about war or prejudice but the university’s decision to ban alcohol from tailgate parties. The demonstrators weren’t agitating for a better tomorrow, they were agitating for a better Saturday afternoon.
Hell, no, we won’t go without a six-pack.
In Washington, the riot wasn’t a protest at all. Police were forced to break out the tear gas and water hoses when 200 rock-heaving partygoers tried to block them from investigating a car-pedestrian accident near campus.
Make love, not accident reports.
And police at Plymouth State were drenched in a rain of bottles, beer cans and rocks hurled by more than 500 reveling students and visitors.
All we are saying is party now!
It’s enough to make aging flower children take down their beaded curtains and snuff out the incense.
I know, I know, it’s the old “this younger generation . . .” whimper. It’s “now, in my day . . .”
Ossifying adults shouldn’t pass judgment or presume intellectual superiority over fresh-faced youngsters.
But in the wake of reports from colleges where binge drinking has led to deaths, protesting a ban on alcohol, not all over campus but only in some areas, seems sophomoric in the extreme.
Students using their collective energies to interfere with an accident investigation? What a waste of a voice.
Where have all the political science majors gone?
In the 1960s, students were an effective and powerful force. If not every student supported the demonstrations, and if not every demonstrator was sincere about changing society and not just getting out of biology lab, there was a core of sincere radicals who moved mountains with their marches, accelerated the cause of civil rights and helped end a particularly nasty war.
Life has not been perfected in the three decades since then. Today’s students could choose from a menu of troubles on which to unleash their power: starvation in North Korea, mutilation of women in the Third World, poverty abroad, poverty at home, little wars around the globe, toxic waste, the rape of the environment, Jerry Springer.
Maybe in the 1990s campus bill of rights, civil liberties are less important than the right to bear beers. Maybe students have a lot to say–just not much to say about making the world a better place. It’s more about making the world a more festive place.
Or maybe when you say “Bud,” you’ve said it all.
