Thursday, February 4th 2010

By Peter Goffin

University students have lost their teeth. That’s the popular view: that we don’t fight anymore, for anything. Politically, socially, we don’t champion causes or stick up for beliefs or even have beliefs. But that’s clearly not true. You’ve seen the protesters, You’ve seen the demonstrations, you’ve seen the signs on bulletin boards and the mass-Facebook-messages. Students are not apathetic. What we are, though, is unfocused. We lose sight of the real causes. We fight petty battles, we fight imagined enemies that do not require beating and, worst of all, we fight each other. And that’s our downfall.

Student protest is always valid. Demonstration is free expression, it’s representation, it’s the greatest, most potent trick we have up our sleeves. But that doesn’t make it productive or useful. It only functions when pointed in the right direction, concentrated and cohesive. And bickering and back-biting and rivalry between student groups is a spray of buckshot – the least concentrated and cohesive we ever get.

Last week, two separate student groups, both purporting to defend and uphold the reputation of Iran and its population against misconceptions and stereotypes, turned on each other over the credentials and beliefs of a speaker asked to attend an event organized by the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War. Instead of spreading the good word on Iran, the HCSW and the McMaster Iranian Students’ Association turned to partisan harping over semantics and university by-laws and due process. Last year, a flare-up in Israel-Palestine fighting gave rise to student groups attacking each other over which one was more opposed to violence. All the while, the real causes, tolerance and peace in both cases, went mostly ignored.

This is the kind of in-fighting that weakens student activism to the point that it gets no recognition. When we get so caught up in smallness and pettiness that we forget our true goals we sell ourselves short. It’s tilting at pinwheels, and I’d rather go after windmills.

If we are going to start lashing out, we ought to knock down someone who really deserves it, someone who’s standing tall and oppressively. Our fight should always be with the Harlem Globetrotters, the perennial winners, and not the Washington Generals. Let’s fight complacency and institutional control. Fight the current establishment, not your enemies of the past, not the weakest enemies, not your peers.

Pick your battles. Pick the ones that matter, the ones that really need to be fought. Concentrate your efforts. Unite. Work together. It does not end oppression to direct your rage at another oppressed group. Let protest make strange bedfellows. Find comradeship in a similar cause. Learn to put differences aside to work together for the betterment of the world around you, whatever that vision may entail.