Where Has All the Unity Gone?

WHERE HAVE ALL the flower children gone?

What happened to youthful activism? The real tragedy of our generation is not that no one wants to be an activist anymore, but that no one can be.

The modern day protester is perceived as something of a fossil, trying vainly to recapture the glory of a bygone era.

In the 15 years that have followed the climax of the counterculture movement, the whole notion of public protest has been slowly but surely (and not accidentally) made into an object of ridicule.

Protesting wore out its welcome. And activists seem to be on the defensive--ever conscious that taking to the streets has become something of a cliche.

Even protesters for divestment, a palatable enough cause, don't have confidence in their movement.

I say this in light of an incident that I witnessed at Brandeis the day the shantytown was erected there. It was 10 p.m., and there were about 15 students huddled around a small fire just outside the shanty. The group was planning to keep the shanty occupied 24 hours a day until Brandeis agreed to completely divest from all companies doing business in South Africa.

I asked the protesters if the recent turmoil over the shanties at Dartmouth had inspired their building effort. Immediately, the protesters became defensive.

I was lectured to about the long history of divestment activism at Brandeis. The students told me that they had been holding divestment protests from the very moment they set foot on the Waltham campus. The Brandeis shanties were built, I was informed, only because repeated attempts at dialogue with the university concerning divestment were rebuffed.

In short, the protesters said, the erection of shanties at Brandeis and Dartmouth were two separate events, related only by coincidence.

BUT WHY WOULD divestment activists at Brandeis be so quick to disassociate themselves from divestment protesters at Dartmouth? Aren't the two struggles necessarily tied together by belief in the same cause? Isn't the divestment movement all about starting a floodtide of divestment among all universities that will ultimately leave South Africa economically isolated?

Nevertheless, Brandeis protesters were too busy dissociating themselves from other divestment activists even to consider sympathizing with them.

The reason for the defensiveness at Brandeis is that student activists in the divestment struggle are scared to death of being thought insincere. Divestment protests might seem like a fad, and the erection of shanties a poor imitation of draft card burning. Thus all evidence of solidarity is denied so as to prove to skeptics that the divestment struggle arises out of a legitimate concern, not a hopeless desire to recapture the '60s.

Such concerns, though understandable, prevent the divestment movement from becoming just that--a movement. The civil rights protesters did not confine their concerns to specific states. If Bull Connor hosed protesters in Alabama, protesters in Mississippi did not keep quiet. Fighting for a cause meant supporting others involved in the same struggle. Each protester knew that he had more than justice on his side--in a real sense he had an entire movement of dedicated protesters prepared to support him and he would do anything to help any of them if that became necessary.

TO DATE, DIVESTMENT activists on various campuses have shown little if any solidarity. Why has Harvard's Southern Africa Solidarity Committee not organized a demonstration in support of the 20 students recently arrested in Hanover for trying to prevent the demolition of a shanty? At the very least, the Harvard divestment movement should have publicly expressed its outrage at the midnight raid on the Dartmouth shanties last month. Similarly, after the disciplining of divestment activists at Harvard this fall, no other campus divestment movement voiced any sympathy.

Of course, divestment by necessity must be carried out on a school-by-school basis. But the goal of divestment ultimately is to bring down apartheid. Surely that is a struggle broader than the confines of any one campus. And surely the opposition to divestment protests anywhere must be answered by divestment activists everywhere.

The rallying cry 20 years ago was "We Shall Overcome." Until we try, no one will overcome anything.