- 25 Apr 2024 02:48
#15313383
I was watching the evening news, and they were covering the protests.
I felt a whoosh, kind of, like when someone thumbs a deck of paying cards. I was hit by a series of emotions over a few few seconds. I've been trying to unpack them since.
It was nice to see kids taking an interest in politics. Been a long time.
Here in Maine, during the Vietnam era, Portland was a sleepy behind the times city. All that stuff you've heard about, violence, hate, that was almost entirely in a few of the major cities. We didn't have any of it. In fact, we would gather round a statue in the center of Portland, and mostly just stand there. There were marches, but I remember them as coming later. For years it would be a handful of people, but at the end it was thousands. Which I still have trouble wrapping my head around.
I felt worried that some of the kids would make mistakes they would come to regret. It happens.
House leader Johnson went to Columbia and said we should call out the National Guard. Which reminded me of Kent State, where 4 college kids were gunned down without reason. The Right had been escalating their rhetoric for some time, anyone involved in politics knew something like that was coming. But the way it happened was shocking, the crowd was not unruly, one of the kids killed wasn't a protester, just a girl walking across the campus.
The images of Columbia showed a bunch of tents, they were nice, most the same brand and model. That doesn't mean anything necessarily, I miss camping, and they were nice tents. Not suitable for backpacking, but nice.
The president of Columbia is an Egyptian economist getting attacked from all sides. I felt sorry for her, she has Right wing extremists attacking her as part of their attempt to undermine education. Left wing attacks who felt she over responded, and Zionists that felt she hadn't done enough.
This is a no win situation for her. She might get through this, but it doesn't seem likely right now.
Another card was a feeling of inevitability. I knew this was coming, but I had no idea when, or how. The timing is not good. I mentioned the Columbia president, because to some extent, most of us are between a rock and a hard place.
That's something I didn't expect.
It would have been nice if this could have been handled in the normal course of politics. That wasn't possible, but now the truth is out there, and there's no putting it back in the cage.
Politics is the art of the possible. But I don't see a political path to resolve this conflict. I suspect this will be a long, drawn out fight that manages to do considerable damage to all it's participants.
That is unfortunate.
I felt a whoosh, kind of, like when someone thumbs a deck of paying cards. I was hit by a series of emotions over a few few seconds. I've been trying to unpack them since.
It was nice to see kids taking an interest in politics. Been a long time.
Here in Maine, during the Vietnam era, Portland was a sleepy behind the times city. All that stuff you've heard about, violence, hate, that was almost entirely in a few of the major cities. We didn't have any of it. In fact, we would gather round a statue in the center of Portland, and mostly just stand there. There were marches, but I remember them as coming later. For years it would be a handful of people, but at the end it was thousands. Which I still have trouble wrapping my head around.
I felt worried that some of the kids would make mistakes they would come to regret. It happens.
House leader Johnson went to Columbia and said we should call out the National Guard. Which reminded me of Kent State, where 4 college kids were gunned down without reason. The Right had been escalating their rhetoric for some time, anyone involved in politics knew something like that was coming. But the way it happened was shocking, the crowd was not unruly, one of the kids killed wasn't a protester, just a girl walking across the campus.
The images of Columbia showed a bunch of tents, they were nice, most the same brand and model. That doesn't mean anything necessarily, I miss camping, and they were nice tents. Not suitable for backpacking, but nice.
The president of Columbia is an Egyptian economist getting attacked from all sides. I felt sorry for her, she has Right wing extremists attacking her as part of their attempt to undermine education. Left wing attacks who felt she over responded, and Zionists that felt she hadn't done enough.
This is a no win situation for her. She might get through this, but it doesn't seem likely right now.
Another card was a feeling of inevitability. I knew this was coming, but I had no idea when, or how. The timing is not good. I mentioned the Columbia president, because to some extent, most of us are between a rock and a hard place.
That's something I didn't expect.
It would have been nice if this could have been handled in the normal course of politics. That wasn't possible, but now the truth is out there, and there's no putting it back in the cage.
Politics is the art of the possible. But I don't see a political path to resolve this conflict. I suspect this will be a long, drawn out fight that manages to do considerable damage to all it's participants.
That is unfortunate.
Facts have a well known liberal bias
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