Reflections on Student Activism - TomDispatch.com

Reflections on Student Activism - TomDispatch.com William Hartung, Democracy Versus Autocracy on America's Campuses May 14, 2024 I was by nature the mildest and least courageous of young men. And yet, in April 1968, I well remember standing with two friends on the Boston Common, amid a large demonstration of young people, and turning in my draft card to protest America's brutal and bloody war in Vietnam about which I had been feeling increasingly outraged (as so many students today are by Israel's nightmarish set of crimes in Gaza). I then returned to my apartment and promptly wrote a letter turning down a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship for which I had previously applied to study the Chinese language and history. In that moment, fearing I would be called up and sent to Vietnam, I had no idea whether I would end up in Canada, in jail, or indeed in the U.S. military. It was my striking luck that five women, who called themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, would later break into my draft board and destroy many of its 1-A files, including my own. From that moment on, I was mobilized into a version of antiwar activism, like so many students horrified by the nightmare in Gaza today. In some strange fashion, the horror of that all-American war (and set of war crimes in a distant land) would quite literally change my life -- I was then a graduate student in Chinese history -- and turn me into an activist. So, I remember well how the feeling of needing to do something -- anything! -- can drive you into another world. That's a reality (or perhaps I mean a surreality) so many of the students now getting arrested across this country are undoubtedly experiencing in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. Today, TomDispatch regular William Hartung, a leading expert on the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex, considers his own years of student activism in the context of what's happening now. He reminds us of just how a gut sense of what's right and truly wrong on this planet of ours can mobilize us, whether we ever meant to be mobilized or not. Tom