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What’s The Lesson Here?

Junious Ricardo Stanton

For the past several weeks the media has focused on the protests and demonstrations roiling on major university campuses across the country. It started at Columbia University in New York City as did the heavy handed university administrations’ calling the police to arrest the students, punishing students for speaking out, encamping on campus grounds and then demonizing them because they challenged the status quo. Now police intervention, arrests and in a few cases violence have occurred. Thankfully we have not seen the types of student anarchy, government, police and military overreactions that characterized the 1960’s, 70’s and beyond.

As the demonstrations continued we saw the usual rationalization for the police intervention: pubic safety, disruption of the educational process, the protesters are anti-Semitic or anti-American, this is the work of “outside agitators” etc. These are some of the same threadbare ramblings that were used against union organizers, Civil Rights activists, the peace and anti-war movements of the mid twentieth century. Haven’t we learned anything from history? Is this a case of “the more things change the more they remain the same”? Apparently it is verboten to dissent, to be a free thinker, a non-conformist or a pacifist in this country.

Nevertheless there are a few bright examples where administrators actually took the time to personally engage in dialogue with the students, face to face and agree to work through some of the issues both sides feel are important in an effort to deescalate the situation. Deals were struck at Rutgers’ University’s New Brunswick campus and the University of California at Riverside between administrators and students. There was compromise on both sides, the students didn’t get all their demands, the administrators gave in on a few issues and the encampments on those campuses were disbanded without bloodshed or continued acrimony and strife.

The young people protesting and camping out are still idealistic they are unencumbered by mortgages, onerous debt other than their student loans, family obligations, soul crushing jobs or the need to conform and comply like older folks. They have not been beaten down by the system to the point they have become docile, passive, apathetic, numb and comatose, alas that will come later. We should be grateful to them for standing up, pushing back and having the courage to stand for something noble rather than acquiescing to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Life is a school, our choices and experiences are our teachers, providers of lessons to be learned, situations to be mastered and personal and collective evolution realized. If we fail to learn the lessons they come back to us over and over again, often in another form to give us an opportunity to get it right, mature and grow.

So what are the lessons for us in this situation. First we should applaud the young people for rejecting a narrative that rationalizes genocide, for refusing to internalize a mindset that justifies war and profits from war and human suffering. We should be proud these young people are caring humanitarians and not mere Zombies who go along with the proverbial okey-doke. Will we repeat the lessons of past generations who ignored genocide and ethnic cleansing by early US settlers, or in Germany and Rwanda?! There is an old saying, “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.” Will we allow the global overlords and warmongers to fool us again?

We can open our eyes and see history repeating itself and learn the lessons from our past that tell us fascism, militarism and apathy destroy our souls and set the table for even more atrocities now and in the future. We can learn pretending not to know what is going on will lead to more of the same as the attacks on peace metastasizes throughout the nation.

We can acknowledge and accept the reality our government is captured and under the control of ruthless interlocking special interests cabals such as: global capital, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Intelligence Technology Hydra, and the Zionist lobby all working in cahoots with the conglomerate media against us. We can learn that the actions of small groups can change things for the better after all; compared to the masses, the oligarchical overlords are a small well organized and resourced group who only succeed by keeping us unaware, divided and constantly at each other's throats.

It has been stated in so many ways over the years, evil can only prevail if good people do nothing! This is true. It is important we contemplate all these lessons, try to learn what they mean for us personally collectively and as a species, otherwise we are already mentally and spiritually dead, merely awaiting interment.

                                                                                                                                               -30-