Despite a disastrous war in Iraq and a litany of other problems in the world, student protest movements today are relatively tame compared to the massive demonstrations over civil rights and Vietnam in the 1960s. Have students really lost all interest in social justice over the past 40 years?
Judging by the plethora of various advocacy groups on campus, the answer would seem to be no. Nevertheless, yesterday's antiwar protest on Library Mall was a far cry from the intense protests described by David Maraniss in his fascinating book ""They Marched Into Sunlight,"" chronicling an October 1967 sit-in at Ingraham Hall in protest of campus recruiters from Dow Chemical Company (the leading manufacturer of napalm).
The sit-in devolved into chaos as police used tear gas to disperse the protesters and viciously clubbed students over the head with nightsticks, including 22-year-old future Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.
Where is this passion today? Where is the moral outrage over the fact that our leaders have led us into yet another Vietnam?
The moral outrage is there, but it's on a much smaller scale. Despite the eerie similarities between the two wars, keep in mind that the quagmire in Iraq is not nearly as enormous as the one in Vietnam. The loss of more than 3,000 U.S. troops in Iraq is undeniably tragic, but that represents roughly 5 percent of the 57,000 U.S. casualties in Vietnam. At the current rate, the war in Iraq would have to last another 72 years (until 2079) to reach the level of Vietnam.
Another significant fact is that there is no longer a military draft. For male students in the 1960s, if your number was called up, your life would be affected: whether by deployment to Vietnam, by escape to Canada, or by a prison sentence.
The war in Vietnam was no abstraction; it was a very serious reality. The lack of a draft has decreased the first-hand urgency of action, among male students in particular, against the Iraq War.
Modern-day student activists claim to be the successors to the civil rights marchers of the 1960s, but this comparison is flawed because civil rights was a domestic issue. Protests against segregation were conducted in areas in which it was actually happening, not across an ocean in a different country, and the majority of participants were people directly affected by the injustice against which they were protesting.
With no draft, the link between the people waving signs on Library Mall and the shape of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq becomes as tenuous as the link between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Second-hand sympathy for the Iraqi people and general disapproval of the Bush administration simply cannot draw crowds to the street in the same numbers that a direct incentive like the draft could 40 years ago.
On a more qualitative note, protesters nowadays appear to have more trouble narrowing their demonstrations to one particular cause. This is good on one level because it shows that more people are recognizing the causal connections between different world events.
But in terms of organizing a mass demonstration, it is the worst possible thing to do. People who will turn out to express opposition to the Iraq War will be turned off if the protest lumps in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, Halloween on State Street, proletarian revolution and a hundred other issues. The more issues that are on the agenda at one time, the greater the capacity is for disunity and dysfunction.
Student protesters should take a moment to re-evaluate themselves and their tactics to make sure that they're converting more people than they're alienating.
But they should also understand the structural reasons why their protests are more sparsely attended than those during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
First, despite its many lingering problems, this is a fundamentally better and more just country today than it was 40 years ago. Second, the war in Iraq is a mere fraction of the size of the war in Vietnam.
I pray that the latter doesn't change, but if it does, expect the protests to get larger.
