Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
It seems silly to write a column about the recent college protests.
It’s not really news when privileged students who have never been in the line of fire and whose most pressing concern is what pronoun they’ll use on any given day decide to rise up against the establishment.
And yet, here we are.
Across the nation, college students have been raising their voices against what some call a “genocide” and others call “Zionist oppression.”
They have been supported in their misguided crusade by politicians like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, women who have veered so close to antisemitic bigotry in their acts and omissions that it’s no longer possible to play the “both sides” game: their refusal to come out and condemn without equivocation Hamas and its acts of terror is a fitting representation of the sort of bigotry so clearly present at these protests.
And that’s why I’m disgusted with the attempts to compare the anti-Israel protests — which are at heart anti-Jew protests — with what happened on college campuses in the 1960s.
Back then, the Vietnam War was raging on, and young American men were being sent to fight in a conflict that many people didn’t support, and many more didn’t understand.
I was too young to remember what was happening then. So I asked a good friend of mine to help me comprehend the 1960s mindset.
Dan Cirucci, a blogger and public relations professional, was a young man at Villanova University in 1968 when he marched against the war and supported those who called for its end. So what does Cirucci think of the current protests?
“This is not like 1968,” Cirucci wrote. “College age Americans were fighting and dying on foreign soil in 1968 in a war that seemed to have no end. And 1968 was the high point of the bloodshed, with 16,592 young American lives lost.”
“Authorities were not nearly as tolerant of college uprisings as they are now. Protesting students were often quickly expelled, and since there was a military draft, they could be legally prosecuted,” Cirucci added. “At Kent State University, the National Guard was called in to quell a student protest. Twenty Eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others in what came to be known as the Kent State massacre.”
I think the thing that struck me the most about Dan’s account is the comment about Kent State.
The protesters today are in no danger of anything other than being arrested, and only if they have committed crimes of trespass or assault.
The students we have seen at UCLA and Columbia and other institutions have become violent, whether because they have acted on their own or allowed outside agitators to join the cause and infiltrate the ranks. No one is killing them.
And not one of them is in danger of being drafted to fight in a foreign war.
Beyond that, as Dan points out, the Vietnam protests were aimed at saving lives.
Dan mentions that he was at Villanova, an Augustinian institution that also happens to be one of my alma maters. There, they prayed for the end of the war, and the safety of the soldiers and the South Vietnamese.
If you attend one of these 2024 protests, it is rare to hear prayers. More likely than not, you will hear faith being twisted into a weapon, and Jewish students being vilified for who they are, and what they believe.
Christine Flowers is a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times. Contact her at:
