Last weekend the traveling protest carnival arrived in D.C. again, and the preemptive analyses of Peter Hamby (Cultural Revolution, Jan. 16) and Scott Matthews (“I love sweatshops,” Jan. 16) were right—dead right. Their light-hearted and entirely uncontradictory essays in last week’s issue of the Voice truly provoked deep introspection amidst the activist community at Georgetown and struck a note of discord within the greater peace and anti-globalization movements, to whom the articles were mass e-mailed.
I have just a few factual misconceptions to clear up about protesters in general and activists here at Georgetown. We’re not hippies. We might be anarcho-communists, we may be playing soccer naked while you’re trying to sleep, and we are certainly on the cutting edge of modern urban fashion. But we’re not hippies, and we don’t smoke weed. At protests, anyway. That’s just a waste of weed.
True, we are all white. Of the 259,342 (my own precise estimate) anti-war protesters in front of the Capitol on Saturday, not a single one was of minority racial status. Those demonstrators from groups such as the Muslim American Society, Black Voices for Peace, the Mexican Solidarity Network, Free Palestine Alliance, scores of labor unions, various Harlem churches and countless other groups you’d never take the time to care about? All white. Jesse Jackson? White. Al Sharpton? White.
But middle class? Come on. The wealthy are even more apt to hold eccentric, un-American views, such as not wanting to cluster bomb thousands of innocent civilians whom we’ve been starving to death. I saw no fewer than seven large men with Mercedes-Benz hood ornaments on gold chains around their necks. And even the rich protesters gave up the tie-dyed shirts and unkempt hair decades ago. Now we’re covert and subversive. We’ve got friends in every suburb and planned community from here to Los Gatos, we speak a dozen languages, know every local custom. We blend in, disappear, you’ll never know where we’re organizing next. With any luck, we’ll have the troops withdrawn by dinnertime Tuesday.
OK, fine, we’re assholes. Face it: You need us. Without us, you wouldn’t exist. And I don’t mean just that you wouldn’t have anyone onto whom to project your deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and impotency. I mean that you, the liberal media, the media in general, liberals at all, wouldn’t exist. Without what protesters, activists and revolutionaries have done, we would all be slaving 90-hour weeks in the rice fields, listening to Mass in Latin, paying 85 percent of our earnings to the Emperor, with no access to any education whatsoever and maybe even no Instant Messenger. You wouldn’t be able to write your self-congratulatory pompous trash letters because you’d be illiterate. Even if you could scratch something out, it wouldn’t get published because there would be no freedom of the press. And if you tried—it’s straight to the gulag.
But you’re right—we are dirty. We smell. I myself haven’t showered in over a week. That’s true. But you have to admit you’re not much different. What about that stank blue hoodie you’ve worn for three months straight? The puddle of your own vomit you slept in last Friday night?
Choosing to ignore what activists have accomplished for you, even right in front of your nose on this campus, lets you recline happily with your bag of Cheetos in your hermetically sealed plastic bubble. The reason you know that Georgetown brand gear apparel is composed of 90 percent cotton, 10 percent blood of impoverished children is that the Solidarity Committee took over the president’s office four years ago and forced the administration to make manufacturers disclose where their factories are located so human rights groups can monitor them.
You think activists take themselves too seriously? What we do makes a difference and we can still laugh at ourselves, what you write is irrelevant and you have to compensate for that by lashing out (or being really, really witty) to appease your puerile ego.
Mocking your own liberal ideals just to write a cynical and pompous diatribe doesn’t make you a creative thinker or budding wonk. You’re adopting a sterilized and plastic-wrapped conformity that helps you convince yourself that by doing nothing, you’re better than those who work for progressive change in their daily lives a couple weekends a year.
Adopting a derivative mainstream position while calling your opinions ‘outlandish’ doesn’t make you a rebel or your arguments relevant. I can read the same tripe in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly or Harpers. At least there it’s reasonably well-written. Your article says much more about your own neurotic guilt for selling out your liberal ideals than it does about the actual lives of activists. Just because we offend you doesn’t make you the arbiter of tactics for progressive movements. Think about your life. What have you ever done to change things? Hint: Penning uninformed reactionary rants based entirely on a specious collective cultural memory of the ‘60s doesn’t count.
But I guess we have to respect your values: selling out your previously cherished ideals; criticizing those who still hold them and actually do something about it (without bothering to actually find out what they’re doing and have accomplished); cloying holier-than-thou preachifying that lacks substance or compelling argument; the use of specious racial demagoguery.
But I can’t really blame you for all that. It’s clearly your hippie parents’ fault.
Eric Nazar is a senior in the College and cover editor of the Georgetown Voice. The showering thing is true.
