Driving through a normally quiet suburban neighborhood of West
Los Angeles, I’ve come across some of the most ardent
protestors of the Iraq war in this city.
The group of approximately 15 local residents who show up
outside of Mar Vista Park every Friday night is not any larger or
louder than the demonstrations that one sees occasionally outside
of the Federal Building, but they are distinguished by two things:
in the age of their members and their consistency.
The local residents are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s, and have
been holding up signs protesting the Iraq war for several
years.
“We started coming out here prior to the invasion (of
Iraq),” said Lillian Gaskin, a 67 year-old retired
teacher.
The protestors hold up signs and cheer as motorists passing by
honk their horns in solidarity.
“We are basically reinforcing other people’s
feelings of concerns, giving them support,” Gaskin told me
when I asked her why they were so persistent.
As a member of the generation labeled apathetic, I began to
wonder why it was our parents out on the streets holding signs.
UCLA has traditionally been an active campus, and when I started
here three years ago I expected to witness more of that typically
left-leaning voice that college students are known for.
Instead, I’ve seen scattered political protests, many held
by groups based off campus.
The student activism that I do see is from within structured
student groups such as CalPIRG, and protests such as the one last
week regarding minority admissions are by no means at the scale
experienced by many of our parents.
In order to better understand the differences between campus
today and the UCLA of 40 years ago, I talked to John Sandbrook,
executive officer of business and administrative services.
Sandbrook went to UCLA as an undergraduate in the 1960s, when he
wrote for the Daily Bruin. He has worked on the campus ever
since.
Sandbrook started at UCLA in 1967, the academic year of the Tet
Offensive in Vietnam, and then the assassinations of both Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Students protesting both the Vietnam War and race relations were
common.
The next year, the black studies program opened. Two Black
Panthers were shot dead in Campbell Hall over a dispute over who
would head the African American Studies center.
In 1969, the lottery changed for the draft. Ping-pong balls with
dates were picked at random, and those with birthdays on the dates
picked closer to the beginning were likely to be drafted.
“I had told myself if my birthday was in the top third …
then I would enlist to dictate what I was going to do,”
Sandbrook said. “But my birthday was picked 345 out of
365.”
“My life was changed because of the ping-pong ball,”
he said.
In a demonstration against the American incursion into Cambodia
in 1970 and the subsequent National Guard shooting of four Kent
State students during a protest, about 4,000 students gathered on
campus, he said.
Los Angeles police officers in riot gear ordered them to
disperse and then chased them through campus, he said.
The governor temporarily closed state schools.
In 1972, basketball star Bill Walton was arrested during a
protest.
The enormity of the events of the late 1960s and ’70s is
almost hard to imagine.
“There was a real fear that the country would rip itself
apart,” Sandbrook said. “It was very heavy
times.”
Even student activism around the time that the United States
began its war with Iraq is nothing compared to what it was,
Sandbrook said.
But the relative quiet of our campus may not be a matter of
apathetic youth. For many undergraduates, the Iraq war was the
first truly divisive political event of our lives. But we have
never faced a draft, never seen a ping-pong ball with our birthday
on it.
The activism that does exist shows its face in a different
form.
The students of the ’60s and ’70s carved pathways
for our generation to use, forcing the creation of policies
regarding students’ right to protest.
And today’s student activism often takes on a new
dimension.
The student movement to divest UC money from Sudan held some
rallies and protested at UC Regents meetings. But where they were
really effective was in their organization and their sophisticated
long-term options that they presented in their interactions with
the regents.
Last year students displayed controversial cartoons depicting
the Muslim prophet Muhammad that were denounced throughout the
Muslim world to discuss the issue of free speech.
As elections roll around, students update their online profiles
with the campaign issues that they care about and support.
That isn’t apathy. It is activism at a different scale, in
a different form, at a different time.
E-mail Mishory at jmishory@media.ucla.edu.