The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at our local state college, about a half-mile from where I live was so new, so quiet and so relatively small compared to the scenes at other schools, that I didn't even know it existed. Not, that it is, until I started hearing the ominous droning sound at around 10:30 Thursday night.
Since we don't live below any flight paths, my first naive thought was that the waxing and waning noise above us was a small plane making helpless circles and that its pilot was either incapacitated or dead. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before it ran out of fuel and crashed in a blazing fireball somewhere in the immediate vicinity. I almost called the town police to report the noise - before it dawned on me that there was probably nothing they could do to bring the plane's distressed pilot safely down to earth.
It's a good thing I decided not to bother them because it turned out that they were otherwise occupied, with more than a hundred state, county and local police in riot gear and armed with nightsticks and zip ties arresting more than a hundred State University of New York demonstrators right down the road. The sounds I heard were surveillance drones and perhaps a helicopter sweeping relentlessly back and forth for over an hour the dark skies above.
Everything I later learned about the police crackdown on campus came from the excellent student newspaper, The Oracle. It is the best source of local news around. What still remains of local mainstream media in this area (and in most of the rest of the United States) is behind a paywall. And anyway, what little information that could be obtained from a larger-circulation daily in Kingston came from a New York State Police press release. Just the facts, ma'm, with all the details and local color professionally omitted for your protection.
They were so professional, in fact, that they herded the arrested students, some of whom were injured, straight into the parking lot of the Student Health and Wellness Center for initial processing. Because the local town court and lockup was too small to host them all, they were transported to facilities far away from the actual scene in order to to be formally arraigned.
By the next day, the number of student demonstrators had swelled and hundreds more of them walked out en masse from classes at noon Friday, bringing the protest directly to the office of the college president.
Participants chanted “40,000 people dead, you’re arresting kids instead” and sang the protest song Solidarity Forever.
First-year education major Soph Rullo said, “I wasn’t too involved in what was going on. I saw what happened last night, and it was completely unnecessary and disgusting. Now, I feel like I need to get involved.
Another first-year student who attended the walk-out said, “I’m here for the people who were arrested last night and couldn’t come here today. I want to stand for Palestine but also for the students that were taken.”
Although The Oracle reports that students at the New Paltz campus were inspired by the protests at Columbia University, this was not their first protest gainst Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.
In February, they'd demonstrated against the presence of three IDF soldiers, who had been brought on campus by the Students Supporting Israel, an international group which is not an officially recognized group at the school.
Anticipating violence among students that never occurred, college officials had limited attendance at the SSI lecture and slideshow to 60 ticket-holders, whose bags were checked and whose bodies were canned before admittance. The barricaded event was guarded by state troopers, both inside and outside the venue. The anti-genocide protesters outside were peaceful and vocal.
So much for politicians like Joe Biden decrying the non-existent violence and "chaos" of student protesters rising up throughout the country. Although of an age to have participated in the youth demonstrations against the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago, Biden was too busy studying to land near the bottom of his Syracuse University law school class to have participated. No wonder he always brags that his wars will entail no American boots on the ground, when he hiimself had balked at ruining his Weejuns in the antiwar protests he found so annoying.
The preppie college boy with the sweater wrapped strategically around his neck has ungracefully aged into a president whose strategic foreign policy is endangering and killing people all over the world. So says career diplomat Hala Rharrit, who just publicly resigned from the State Department to protest the genocide of Palestinians.. In a devastating interview on Democracy Now!, she effectively and accurately called Biden a war criminal who is making everybody less safe, both at home and abroad.
As disgusting and maniacal he and his merry group of war profiteers are, however, they're doing us a pretty big favor. They are radicalizing a whole generation of young people, whose protests are already expanding from fighting against one genocide into fighting the whole corrupt military industrial complex. As I watch these young people, I feel the knot in my stomach relax, knowing that the current gerontocratic regime will not last forever despite all the concierge health care their ill-gotten money can buy. Biden, far from squelching the righteous outrage on college campuses and in the streets, is only feeding it. His piecemeal loan forgiveness crumbs are blowing away on the hot air of his own sneering bombast.
Solidarity is rearing its lovely head. And the empty rhetoric of powers-that-be is falling into a million little pieces.
A sure sign that they're losing their messaging war is that they interrupted Friday's White House press briefing with Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame playing "Joe-E-Wan-Kenobe" in Biden's trademark aviator shades.
The fawning Guardian reporter gave the performance a rave review, even detailing the hilarious and supportive and appreciative reactions of the supporting players in the press corps.The writer further noted that Biden has enlisted both the dollar and performative help of Hollywood in an effort to boost his sagging poll numbers.
So it was a bit jarring to read at the end of the piece that actor Robert De Niro had gone on MSNBC to apparently commit the heresy of fuming “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s fucking scary.”
It turns out he fooled you. He was talking about Trump, you utterly silly people!
I think I'd better stick with reading student newspapers, the last bastion of a free and independent press.
