Is there a sight more stirring than that of sickly students starving themselves outside a senator’s office, demanding justice of some sort?
Perhaps not ““ all at once the spectacle begs comparison to Mohandas Gandhi, Marion Dunlop and similar champions of social change. Had you by any chance passed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s L.A. office in recent weeks, you’d have seen such a scene for yourself.
Camped out on the street in the sweltering heat, the hunger strike was hard to ignore. It ended Wednesday ““ two days after this publication ran a submission written by fellow striker and undergraduate student government President Jasmine Hill, lauding the strike and its goal: the passage of the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act. For two weeks, they emptied their stomachs in hope of inspiring our senator to a similar zeal.
But whatever merit underlies the motives of our DREAMers, a hunger strike is just a spectacle, one that is both morally and logically untenable as a method of persuasion. Shenanigans of this sort give activism a bad name.
Was there a point to all this stomach-grumbling? One can’t be sure. Feinstein had already supported the bill; surely their energy would have been better aimed at, say, an opponent. Still, their demand for her to go further and “champion” the act (to use Hill’s preferred verb) is understandable ““ to a point. There are desperate measures, and then there are foolish measures.
One brave soul, having spent 14 days on empty, admitted the strike was a “last resort.” A graduate of California State University, Fullerton, Jorge Gutierrez, said the efforts to lobby and petition could only go so far.
Naturally, the obvious Plan B is to starve yourself. And in case you’ve not had your fill of famished activism, recent UCLA alumna Andrea Ortega said the campaign in New York may start its second hunger strike.
“We are sacrificing our health for this,” she said, unwittingly revealing their very mentality: When all else seems to fail, we gamble with our lives.
A case can certainly be made that an act of self-immolation is a statement, a show of solidarity with another’s figurative (or even literal) starvation. My aching heels have at least glimpsed such pains at Dance Marathon, and who among us has not marched in some demonstration or another?
But the strain thereof has always been symbolic, not in and of itself a means to persuade. A hunger strike, however, creates its own suffering as its main selling point.
For the strike’s contention (we won’t eat till you give in) can be rephrased: If you don’t give in, we will starve. Self-starvers essentially take their health hostage, and the ransom is political favor.
Strikers make targets complicit in their self-inflicted misery. One’s conscience rests on their demands. This is moral blackmail if I’ve ever seen it.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong with guilt-tripping. But when said guilt is misplaced, it is both tasteless and trivial. A hunger strike is little more than transitive guilt-mongering ““ that is to say, it confuses guilt over one thing (their hunger) with guilt over another (their cause).
Yet a distinction must be made between the plight of the undocumented and the hunger of the activists who represent them. It might very well be true that governments are accountable for the harsh realities of immigrants, but that is not what targeted politicians see.
They see bleeding-heart young men and women starving themselves needlessly, and it is to that pitiful sight that they respond. This is emotional exploitation, not a logically sound connection. As an argument, it reeks of fallacy.
So long as the DREAM campaign continues to condone these theatrics, it perpetuates the undue myth of the hunger strike as some heroic feat. Historically, such strikes have made martyrs out of leaders and helped shed light on gross injustices. Like their historical counterparts, our DREAMers have stirred up quite a ruckus, no doubt raising public awareness along the way.
But they, like past hunger activists, cross the line from nonviolent resistance into passive self-aggression ““ making threats with their lives, consciously or not. What might be a noteworthy cause becomes instead a form of political extortion.
My advice? Get some food, get some rest and save your health for more legitimate things (there’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned protest). One ought not resort to juvenile ploys, no matter how urgently emotions run.
The Greeks had a name for such urgency. They called it “thumos,” and it entailed a righteous, selfless indignation. The Greeks also had a name for mistaking virtue with folly. It was “hubris,” and it was the downfall of many a would-be hero.