The most depressing aspect of the student protests against CUC has been the response of ordinary students. These students alternately claim that the public is hostile to anyone who participates in nonviolent demonstrations, and, on the flip side, that BFS isn’t important; that the only real important struggles are the truly and immediately "global" ones–ones that save the rainforest or somesuch.

What’s interesting about those who say that nonviolent demonstrations look foolish, especially when enacted by college kids, is these critics tend to avoid saying that they think protesters look foolish or childish; it is always someone else, most often the "general public." If this is the case, then it would seem that there is a problem with the general public, not the protesters.

Insofar as critics are willing to say that they think that nonviolent demonstrations look foolish, they are implicitly declaring that there is no cause for which they take such measures or brave such risks. And if that is indeed the case–that there is no cause for which we would be willing to be suspended or arrested, that there is no issue that we value more than our relationship with this educational institution–it us who look pathetic and childish, not the protesters. If this is the case, we’ve degenerated to new levels of selfishness.

Perhaps this goes too far; perhaps the critics of the student protests believe that there is no limit to what can be accomplished through rational debate and discourse. The history of this particular struggle highlights precisely the limits to such debate and discourse; CUC has consistently ignored the protests of faculty and students.

Critics also contend, always from the sidelines, that this is too local, too insignificant, not global enough. Ignoring the obvious problems of telling someone that they’re protesting the wrong thing while protesting nothing oneself, there is something to be learned through an analysis of the term "global" in this context. By "global" we tend to mean issues like the destruction of the rainforests–in other words, issues that are local issues elsewhere, but, because of our distance, appear as "global" problems. So when we say "involve yourself in global protest," what we mean is "involve yourself in protests somewhere else."

The fundamental point that these protests have driven home (rather uncomfortably) is that there are valid sites of resistance here at Pomona. Perhaps our collective instinctive dismissal of these protests stems more from our shame that there is nothing that we care about so deeply, that we know, on some level, that we should have a commitment of this order, and can’t help but be embarrassed that we do not. But perhaps it’s simpler than that; these protests drive home just how little control we have over what goes on literally down road, which is, to say the least, frightening.

And the protesters are not going to win. But only because we’re not going to help them.

–Dan Check