Protest, Protest, Pick Yourself A...Sides?

     What?  Protests on America's college campuses?  Who would'a thunk it?

     Seriously, if the phrase "campus protest" surprises you, you must have been asleep since, um, pretty much forever.  Young people, exploring the anteroom of adulthood, most of them out from under direct parental control for the first time, expressing strong opinions?  Heavens to Murgatroyd!

     And we are, of course, urged to choose a side by the pundits, talking heads, and everybody's opinionated uncle and loudmouthed niece on social media.  Why, one side is clearly wrong and the other is clearly right, and if only we weren't so blind, we'd see that.  And to prove it, we've got politicians and preachers who were having lunch with crypto-neo-nazis just last week tsk-tsking the dangers of unchecked antisemitism on one side, vs. LGBT protesters for strongly anti-gay Hamas on the other (etc.), and so on and so forth.

     Maybe take a step back.  Dead civilians are an offense to common decency, no matter who they were in life or what their own opinions were, and if there's one thing the ongoing conflict between the government of Israel and Hamas has produced in excess, it's the lifeless bodies of the innocent.  Young people occupying open spaces, shouting slogans at one another, waving signs, getting into shoving matches, graffitiing buildings and dorm-room doors isn't going to resolve it -- but neither is sending in police with shields, pepper spray, clubs and guns to roust them out.  It's probably not even going to do a very good job of clearing out those spaces.

     And while it is very easy to cast all sides as monolithic blocks, it's not useful.  Police vary from reluctant to bored to eager; administrators from distantly sympathetic to intransigent to spineless to fearful.  Protestors?  Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestine, Pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Zionist, pacifists to direct action types to jaded children of privilege, excited to really feel something even if they're not clear what.  And they're all jammed in there, on college greens and parks, inside your TV or phone screen, spinning out soundbites like sparks from a forge. No side is all one thing and if you get pulled in, you're only adding to the noise.

     There are occasional public events where one side is clearly bad; there are a few where one side is unmistakably good.  Most of them are far murkier and this set of protests is typical.  Adding bruised, arrested kids (and professors and whoever) here to the toll already piled up in and around Gaza isn't going to reduce the injury, and history tells us it doesn't necessarily end there.

     It'd be nice to get some functional adulting working on this problem before it spins into blood and PTSD for all involved.  We're damned unlikely to get any in the Middle East any time soon.  I'm not much more optimistic about over here.