The Revolution will be Twittered!

[redcactusflower]

Gawker has a hilarious story today about NYU Students staging an occupation of the school's food court demanding "fiscal transparency" and relief for Gaza.

Brothers and sisters of the proletariat, you must at this very moment drop your bacon egg and cheese wraps and rush down to the Marketplace at Kimmel Center, where a dashing group of Zapata-like

Comments

[watchreader]

To me, it's the "group of attractive young sexually available rebels" that seals the whole thing.

And while I agree with your assessment that protesting is, for the most part, really stupid and pointless, I'm not sure I'd agree with your reasoning why. Although then again, at Tech we didn't really have protests. No one was politically active at all really. The only protests that occurred were of the religious variety:
"Stop abortion!" ::hands out pamphlet of fetus::
Me:"uh... what do you want me to do about it?"
Them: "Don't... get an abortion?"

"Keep marriage holy! Don't let the fags marry!"
Me: "why not?"
Them: "Jesus!"

Either that or leftests who decided to protest REALLY subtly:
"Wear something green on April 3rd to protest conditions of Darfur refugees."
Me: "um... what's that going to do exactly?"
Them: "well, if enough people wear green, than maybe someone will be curious as to why there are people wearing green, and ask us why we are wearing green. So then we can tell them about Darfur."

Etc. etc. I wouldn't critique either these protesters nor the ones at Tech on the grounds that they have privilege. If they believe that bringing attention to these causes is more important than helping the poor or uneducated in their own city, I'm not going to begrudge them of that. I would critique them on the grounds that their causes are stupid, and not ones in which protesting would have any effect.

[redcactusflower]

Oh gosh, I had forgotten about all the "wear this color to show solidarity" days. What gets me about the uselessness of college protests is that your only audience is the same couple thousand people you see on campus every day, and it's not like they didn't see a similar activist thingy for another cause last week. After a while I became numb to all the booths outside the cafeteria advertising the thirdworld/orphan/incurable disease/enviro cause/international service trip of the day.

[watchreader]

What also really got me were the "information campaigns" about things that no one could really do anything about. Even though I belong to some of the big ones (Liberty in North Korea), I have to admit they are pretty lame.

"Bring Liberty to North Korea!"
"How?"
"Um... I guess if we talk about it enough.... it'll happen?"
"I'm pretty sure just informing people isn't going to bring liberty to North Korea."
"Yea, but if we TALK about it, we can INFORM people about North Korea and then make them DEPRESSED about it. Progress!"