A Defense of COCA's "Shock Activism"

NOT thinking about politics is easy for people whose daily survival is never seriously threatened. When I feasted on turkey last Thursday, it slipped my mind that the people of El Salvador have a lot less to be thankful for than they should.

That's why recent actions by the Committee on Central America (COCA) are so appropriate. Confronting the predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class Harvard community with the current realities of Central America--forcing us to think about what's going on down there--is a job that no one else in the University has taken on. And it's a job that needs to be done.

COCA has broken out of the cycle of dining-hall tabling and rallies that most campus activist groups find themselves locked into. Such traditional tactics are not wholly useless. There is no substitute for one-on-one discussion of pertinent issues, and rallies can serve to spark student enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, for the most part, Harvard students are bored with tablers and ralliers. Most of us have seen them too many times, and they no longer particularly grab us.

By employing what might be termed "shock tactics," COCA has managed to attract the attention it needs to carry out its educational mission. The group's most controversial actions this year--the mock assassinations of "communist" students in House dining halls, and the distribution of mock draft notices to 900 male undergraduates--have been most effective.

LEFTISTS and rightists at Harvard share a tendency to reject all activist militance as empty militance. Conservatives predictably reject nearly all student activism as overblown. Leftists themselves are also to blame, though, for rejecting innovative options. Reluctant to appear too radical, activists here rarely deviate from the norm of University Hall rallies. COCA's recent tactics are undoubtedly militant, and unusual for Harvard, but they are anything but empty.

COCA is not trying to change any specific University policy. The point of the sort of activism the group has been carrying out is to make politics come alive for Harvard students--to turn a seemingly abstract, removed, "Third World" situation into something relevant, emotional, and real.

Eating a meal in a House dining hall here has its points of tension, as does getting the daily mail from the mailbox. Our lives here at Harvard can be very complex. That is undeniable. Yet compared to most of the world's people, we lead easy existences, and we are generally pretty complacent about doing so. An interruption of our habitual activities by an ultimately harmless "shooting" or a draft card can shock us into at least a temporary awareness of our complacency.

THIS is not to say that laying a collective guilt trip on the Harvard community should be the goal of campus activism. Being shocked into self-awareness is not the same thing as being made to feel guilty. Good "shock-activism" will create, among students, a new emotional connection with what was previously merely a newspaper headline. Such an emotional awareness should lead to thought and discussion about the issue at hand, in this case the role of the U.S. government in El Salvador.

One cannot display any quantitative evidence that COCA's actions have had any effect on the thoughts and discussions of Harvard students in recent weeks. Still, it is likely that there has, indeed, been an effect. The actions have provoked some discussion in the campus press. And surely not every one of the 900 students who received draft notices shrugged it off as junk mail.

It is understandable that some students have been frightened or upset by COCA's recent tactics. But their fear and anger should not be ultimately directed at COCA. Rather, we should be broad-sighted enough to realize that the real terror resides not in COCA's actions but in the right-wing atrocities our government, for all intents and purposes, is financing in El Salvador. And to acknowledge that COCA is turning such abstract "right-wing atrocities" into something tangible to Harvard students.

Our anger should be directed toward the system that encourages us to get angry at the slightest disruptions in our daily routine, while it simultaneously funds the killings in El Salvador. COCA is doing a good job of laying bare the hypocrisy of that system.