Day 321: Simple Origami
This time I took the first topic offered. I may have written about this before, but too bad, here I go again.
One of the things that I was most involved with during high school was a student political club that I and a friend whose parents were Communists (like, literally -- one was the nicest Stalinist you could ever hope to meet, who had fled with his family from Poland just ahead of the Nazis, and then gone back as an anti-Nazi spy just post-war, as a nineteen year old or something crazy like that; the other, D's mother, was an Italian Eurocommunist with strong opinions and amazing cooking skills). D. and I argued all the time about how hard left our little club was going to be -- he wanted us to have a study group and read Michael Parenti's Democracy for the Few, while I wanted us to create speakers' platforms for people in the Sanctuary movement from El Salvador, and attend nuclear freeze AND Central American solidarity demonstrations. I won, basically, in the first round, and then our adult club sponsors won, on the surface at least, in the second round. They forced us to change our club name from the "Evanston Progressive Students Committee" (which I stole from the student activists at Northwestern University, where I frequently meeting-hopped on weekday evenings) to "Students for International Understanding" -- the first public event of which was an international potluck. Oh, god, I was furious.
Nevertheless, we kept struggling for autonomy and radical actions. We would paint banners and go on demonstrations in solidarity with the guerillas in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua one weekend, and then -- here comes the origami -- fold a thousand paper cranes and have tables to ask that student volunteers fold another thousand paper cranes, and then stuff them in cardboard boxes and LITERALLY mail them to Leonid Brezhnev, the week after this. Let me check the year, it might have been Andropov. Yeah, I think it was Andropov, unless it was early in the year.
The cranes drove me crazy. I don't think I folded a single one myself. Yes, it was visual and symbolic, but did it educate anyone in anything? No. Plus, I was completely a unilateral disarmament proponent (me and E. P. Thompson and the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and was disgusted that we sent cranes to Russian leaders, and none to Reagan.
On the other hand, we also had alternative political projects around disarmament, which I thought were better political education of those participating in them as activists. We organized a school campaign to declare Evanston Township High School a Nuclear-Free Zone (yes, totally symbolic; no one was suggesting hosting missiles or even nuclear accelerators at ETHS), and held our referendum on the same day as the campus-wide Student Council election. Hundreds more students voted in our referendum than bothered to vote for Student Council electors, and of those who voted in the referendum, about 83% voted in favor of declaring the school a Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone. Oh, we (and often, mostly me) made the principal angry. Those sorts of things were always why I got called to the principal's office. So fucking stupid.
The upshot of this campaign was, however, indicative. All the young liberal students in the club were so proud of our efforts, and so certain that this democratic endeavor would prevail, and I pretty much knew it wouldn't. They called a School Board Meeting -- on the same night as my Medieval Banquet, so I was dressed in a Medieval costume I'd made myself, and had to duck out of one of the songs the Madrigal choir was performing, to go to the meeting, held in Beardsley N-112, the Study Hall room. Several other SIU members were there, and at least three of us spoke before the School Board, which listened impatiently and then quashed the results of the referendum, saying students had no authority to declare any school status. I was not in the least surprised, but for the other students (apart from D., also a red diaper baby) it was a shock and a disillusionment. I felt slightly guilty because I had seen this sort of disillusionment produced intentionally by some left groups, as a way to radicalize activists' consciousness. But I didn't do it on purpose -- we did everything right, everything possible to create democratic change, and the institution could not permit democracy. Still, much more educational than the origami cranes.
One of the things that I was most involved with during high school was a student political club that I and a friend whose parents were Communists (like, literally -- one was the nicest Stalinist you could ever hope to meet, who had fled with his family from Poland just ahead of the Nazis, and then gone back as an anti-Nazi spy just post-war, as a nineteen year old or something crazy like that; the other, D's mother, was an Italian Eurocommunist with strong opinions and amazing cooking skills). D. and I argued all the time about how hard left our little club was going to be -- he wanted us to have a study group and read Michael Parenti's Democracy for the Few, while I wanted us to create speakers' platforms for people in the Sanctuary movement from El Salvador, and attend nuclear freeze AND Central American solidarity demonstrations. I won, basically, in the first round, and then our adult club sponsors won, on the surface at least, in the second round. They forced us to change our club name from the "Evanston Progressive Students Committee" (which I stole from the student activists at Northwestern University, where I frequently meeting-hopped on weekday evenings) to "Students for International Understanding" -- the first public event of which was an international potluck. Oh, god, I was furious.
Nevertheless, we kept struggling for autonomy and radical actions. We would paint banners and go on demonstrations in solidarity with the guerillas in El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua one weekend, and then -- here comes the origami -- fold a thousand paper cranes and have tables to ask that student volunteers fold another thousand paper cranes, and then stuff them in cardboard boxes and LITERALLY mail them to Leonid Brezhnev, the week after this. Let me check the year, it might have been Andropov. Yeah, I think it was Andropov, unless it was early in the year.
The cranes drove me crazy. I don't think I folded a single one myself. Yes, it was visual and symbolic, but did it educate anyone in anything? No. Plus, I was completely a unilateral disarmament proponent (me and E. P. Thompson and the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and was disgusted that we sent cranes to Russian leaders, and none to Reagan.
On the other hand, we also had alternative political projects around disarmament, which I thought were better political education of those participating in them as activists. We organized a school campaign to declare Evanston Township High School a Nuclear-Free Zone (yes, totally symbolic; no one was suggesting hosting missiles or even nuclear accelerators at ETHS), and held our referendum on the same day as the campus-wide Student Council election. Hundreds more students voted in our referendum than bothered to vote for Student Council electors, and of those who voted in the referendum, about 83% voted in favor of declaring the school a Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone. Oh, we (and often, mostly me) made the principal angry. Those sorts of things were always why I got called to the principal's office. So fucking stupid.
The upshot of this campaign was, however, indicative. All the young liberal students in the club were so proud of our efforts, and so certain that this democratic endeavor would prevail, and I pretty much knew it wouldn't. They called a School Board Meeting -- on the same night as my Medieval Banquet, so I was dressed in a Medieval costume I'd made myself, and had to duck out of one of the songs the Madrigal choir was performing, to go to the meeting, held in Beardsley N-112, the Study Hall room. Several other SIU members were there, and at least three of us spoke before the School Board, which listened impatiently and then quashed the results of the referendum, saying students had no authority to declare any school status. I was not in the least surprised, but for the other students (apart from D., also a red diaper baby) it was a shock and a disillusionment. I felt slightly guilty because I had seen this sort of disillusionment produced intentionally by some left groups, as a way to radicalize activists' consciousness. But I didn't do it on purpose -- we did everything right, everything possible to create democratic change, and the institution could not permit democracy. Still, much more educational than the origami cranes.