Last week an editor at The Daily Caller, a Dartmouth '91, reached out to current students as a part of his advance research on protest or flash mob action taking place on campus to coincide with the Republican debate. I had to laugh mirthlessly. I wrote him back to say that the real story was either the student body's apathy, or the unfocused goofiness and lack of the real biting coherence of their occasional protests of the issues that our country and generation demand. If efficacy in change is our aim, we ought to find new ways to accomplish progressive goals. The old tactics are almost useless.
Campus activism is comatose in America after all, so many things have been going wrong at once in a seemingly orchestrated explosion of shock and awe that no young person could possibly know where to start and no old person could possibly have the energy to sort through it all. To stack the deck against democratic action further, all sorts of bogus "security" and "safety" laws, which have the effect of limiting protests, have been enacted in major cities since the public upheavals against NAFTA, the WTO, the Iraq War and the Bush-Cheney GOP conventions of the otherwise quietly prosperous '90s and '00s. But things are not prosperous now now, real protest action demands our scrutiny.
The incoherent protests that took place this Tuesday on the Green before the GOP debate offer a dire sign for those taking the vitals of Dartmouth's social consciousness not just because very few cared enough to do themselves or each other justice by showing up to say "I am the 99 percent," but because those who did were basically forced into abdicating their First Amendment rights by police and Safety and Security, who informed them that they could not practice unlimited free speech and public assembly on public land.
Protesters were instructed by Safety and Security and police to enter a "Campaign Visibility Area" a penned-in zone with its own rules of engagement, outside of which free speech was declared a "safety concern." The CVA was fenced off delegitimizing dissent, containing the protesters as subjects of canned media photo-op production and stripping them of their agency to assemble wherever they pleased, all in the name of some abstract idea of "security" utterly irrelevant in Hanover.
That night, Dartmouth held the Republican debate. Ironically, the spectacle and its candidates were as meaningless as their tangential protests. By this time, the protesters had all but given up their anemic calls of "We are the 99 percent!" mumbled from the CVA playpen. Dartmouth was at a standstill, hypnotized by the bombastic banality of former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain's delivery of his "9-9-9" plan. During the performance, we forgot if many knew to begin with that Hanover had ceased to be a free speech zone.
Even more ironically, many of the GOP candidates on that stage from Rick Perry to Ron Paul have argued during this campagign that our constitutional rights are under attack.
The surrender of those rights is seldom a seismic affair. As in the case of these protests, that cession is usually quiet, pathetic and swept under the wake of a larger spectacle whether "terrorism," war, hyped up prognostications of fiscal doom or a Republican comedy hour disguised as a policy debate. So what kind of change do we expect from chanting and holding up signs between police barricades, just performing as simulacrum citizens for television footage?
Sadly, it's not even worth writing here that Tuesday's protests solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, demands for new climate change policy, demands for more AIDS funding changed nothing, not just because of apathy but because of the absurd rules of engagement. Those rules are not worth engaging, in Hanover, Manhattan, Athens, London or any city on the globe. Those who willingly cede their rights while protesting the loss of their economic agency ultimately do themselves a disservice. We must find new ways to exercise our rights. Those who lead by example to accomplish social change with coherent action and justified, communicable dissidence are the only ones who can alter the course of our society. When you are coerced to protest in specific protest zones, refuse. When the game is rigged, don't play.
