Tunisia, December 2010: A man self-immolates and consequently sparks a worldwide conflagration. Pro-democracy protesters respond in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Iraq. Calls for regime change, for economic empowerment, social and political justice, free speech, the ending of police brutality, and the eradication of corruption galvanize millions across North Africa and the Middle East. Streets are filled, strikes are leveraged, and now, on two occasions, regimes are toppled. Libya’s fate, both tragic and uncertain, will unfold in coming weeks. And as the storm continues to gather, the fate of world democracy, too, may soon unfold. At long last, the pillars of authoritarianism and neo-liberalism have been shaken; a new world is possible.

This historical moment has not been confined to North Africa and the Middle East. Rather, countries as diverse as China, South Africa, and Russia have experienced incipient and growing social unrest. Since the world economic meltdown, Greek, Spanish, French, British, Irish, and Portuguese citizens have protested en masse, opposing the proposed “austerity” measures of their governments. Workers have struck; millions have filled the streets. And now, via Wisconsin, the storm has arrived in the United States.

The unrest in Wisconsin was catalyzed by Governor Scott Walker’s explicit, legislative attempt to disembowel public sector unions. And as of Wednesday, March 9, this attempt has been successful. After weeks of protests and strikes in Madison, Wisconsin Republicans finally rammed Walker’s anti-union bill through the senate. Though senate Democrats had fled the state to prevent a vote, Republicans managed, by separating the legislation into two parts, to hold a vote without having reached a quorum. This legislative maneuvering is highly questionable. Democrats are already preparing legal challenges. Assuming their challenges are unsuccessful, though, Wisconsin unions will soon experience their most significant defeat in generations.

Walker’s bill contains a few key provisions. First, it would strip unions of collective bargaining rights, which are the primary means to the protection of workplace rights. Additionally, the bill would restrict unions to bargaining for base wages, limit raises to the rate of inflation, disallow union contributions to political campaigns, and prohibit the automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks. This last provision is crucial. It would severely drain union finances, thus further undermining unions’ capacity to advocate for their members. Additionally, the government would have the terrifying and draconian power to fire any state employee who engages in a strike or who misses more than three workdays. In short, public unions would become bankrupt, powerless, and politically inconsequential. Needless to say, this is an enticing prospect for the Republican governor, in light of unions’ strong allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Walker states that his legislation is necessary for the state to balance its $137 million budget deficit. Yet his actions suggest other motivations. Immediately after becoming governor, he signed corporate-friendly tax and health care legislation that will cost Wisconsin $117 million. He refused even to consider a marginal tax increase for the wealthy.

The governor’s attack on unions is not merely a cost-cutting strategy. Nor is it a necessary means to solvency. Rather, it stems from a much deeper, deeply ideological, right-wing attack on democracy. It represents a nation-wide, conservative backlash which aims to strip political and economic rights from citizens, granting them instead to the wealthiest, most powerful interests. Across the country, state governments are attempting to pass legislation like Walker’s. Some states have already succeeded. Some will likely soon succeed. Workers across the country are under siege.

Though these attacks on the working class have recently reached a feverish pitch, we must see them within a larger historical context. Since the passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, working people have seen their rights slowly chiseled away under the blows of corporate interests and sympathetic governments. The union movement today shares few similarities with the movement that earned Americans health care, the weekend, and the eight-hour workday. Today, union participation is at a record low. The movement is moribund and quite often ineffectual. Unions are a dying breed.

In this precarious position, Walker’s bill will likely deliver a deathblow to the union movement. Scores of labor historians and union members agree that if Wisconsin does indeed “fall,” the other states will soon follow suit. In other words, if Walker is successful, the Republican anti-union agenda will quickly gather unstoppable momentum. Consequently, the workplace rights of millions of Americans will be instantaneously jeopardized. Millions will lose bargaining power. Millions will experience sudden income and benefit cuts. Millions will be made to suffer in the name of “deficit-reduction.” In the meantime, the banks and corporations responsible for the economic crisis will rightfully expect further bailouts and tax breaks. Injustice, in our country, will reach a sickening level.

This attack on workers, though, is not isolated to government policy. Rather, it is one feature of a larger, corporate mindset which has permeated all corners of public life. At Dartmouth, for example, the priority of efficiency has become a defining characteristic of the Kim administration. Over the last two years, Dartmouth staff have experienced substantial lay-offs, hour cuts (read: salary reductions), and benefit reductions. Furthermore, since 2005, the college has invested over $100 million in trustee-owned firms. Such an investment policy is an obvious conflict of interest and raises critical concerns regarding the priorities of our trustees. Lastly, the resignations of Deans Spears, Larimore, and Ivery have indicated broader, institutional problems within the administration. Our college is increasingly run like a corporation.

These trends, representative of anti-democratic strains within Dartmouth, have thrust the question of democracy into the campus spotlight. Students, faculty, and staff have rightly begun to demand answers from the administration. Like the protesters in Wisconsin and Egypt, we have begun to demand accountability from our “rulers.” We have begun to demand more say in the way that our lives are run.

History will view 2011 as a flash of light in the global struggle for democracy. Less than three months into the year, two regimes have been toppled. Many more tremble in the winds of social unrest. Needless to say, our struggles are far from over. Egypt is still controlled by the military, enormous protests in Europe have been largely ineffectual, and Scott Walker has all but demolished Wisconsin’s unions. Thus, the enormous and perpetual task of transforming society is still ahead of us. And yet, as we have seen, the masses are no longer slumbering. Rather, in fitful, seemingly spontaneous bursts—in Egypt, Wisconsin, or France—they have woken to demand a better world. They have done so with passion, tenacity, and a deep yearning for democracy. As the people of North Africa struggle to free themselves from neo-liberal and authoritarian rule, we must follow their example. We, too, can demand a more just society. We, too, can demand a better world.

Dartmouth employees are systematically losing their health care. They have been fired without representation in budget meetings, and an increasing number of jobs are being subcontracted to private corporations. According to SEIU local 560 President Earl Sweet—leading custodian of Dartmouth Hall and a Dartmouth employee for over thirty years—“Campus is being torn apart.” And yet the plight of workers has gone largely unnoticed by students. Instead of examining questions of community responsibility, we focus on the narrow concerns of our social lives and our GPA’s. We spend our time drinking at fraternities and applying for internships. We fundraise for Haiti relief and donate to local charities—certainly worthy pursuits—yet we fail to address the major moral problems of our immediate community.

At a February 2 panel discussion organized by Dartmouth Students Stand with Staff, these questions of responsibility—of justice, equality, and democracy—were addressed by panelists Phoebe Gardener ’11, Robert Polanco ’11, and Earl Sweet. Through the discussion, panelists and audience members articulated a broad critique of the corporate values that largely govern Dartmouth life and the world beyond. According to moderator and Assistant Professor of History Russell Rickford, “Dartmouth is at the center of the rottenness of the system.”

Union President Earl Sweet began his remarks by emphasizing the attachment that he and other employees feel to the college and its students. “Everyone I represent says their job is serving the students,” he said. Commenting on his long relationship with the school, he added, “You can’t walk away from here… [after] all these years… and not have a feeling for Dartmouth.” This attachment has made the administration’s recent attacks on employees especially bitter.

The first round of layoffs began in 2009, when sixty employees were terminated. Another forty were laid off in 2010. Additionally, numerous employees were pressured into early retirement, while others experienced significant cuts in their hours (and thus their salaries). This January, the administration went one step further by drastically cutting health care benefits for all staff members. According to Sweet, many employees now pay an additional four thousand dollars on health care per year—an amount previously paid by the college. For working class families, the effects of these cuts have been catastrophic. Many employees are now struggling to pay for the doctor’s visits and medications needed to keep them healthy. Indeed, some employees can’t even afford to have their children treated at the hospital.

In light of present and future major expenditures—such as the new Center for Health Care Delivery Science and upcoming Thompson Arena and Baker library renovations—Mr. Sweet said, “I have to question, how much of this is needed? We had no say in it.”

Students Stand with Staff (SSwS) leader Phoebe Gardener ’11 used her introductory remarks in part to discuss the general goals of her organization. It was founded in 2009 amidst Dartmouth’s $100 million deficit, and operated in response to the administration’s top down approach to budget cuts. In opposition to this approach, it advocated for the representation and involvement of staff in the budget cut process. Additionally, SSwS opposed the subcontracting of positions to private corporations. And yet, according to Gardner, “It was and continues to be about something much bigger… We were [and are] fighting against a specific set of values.” These values include the primacy of cost-saving and efficiency in administrative processes, and the “values of placing money over people.”

According to Gardener, these values shape not only our community, but the entire world.
These corporate values, reflected in the assault on workers, are also visible in student life. We have inculcated them to the point where resumes and GPA’s become a necessary means to a lucrative end. We, too, have accepted the primacy of efficiency and profit. We study so we can ace an exam and get that crucial recommendation. We pull all-nighters so we can get the A’s that will get us into law school. With these goals and values, according to Gardener, “Our work becomes a task to be done.” Genuine intellectual exploration is sacrificed on the altar of “the transcript.” Course selection is often predicated on median grades statistics. As we submerge ourselves in this world, we become blind to the existence of other community members. This blindness, in turn, allows the causes of this suffering to remain unchallenged. “I, as a student at Dartmouth… am implicated in workers’ rights on campus,” said Gardner. Indeed, by allowing this injustice to continue, we all are culpable.

Robert Polanco ’11 emphasized Dartmouth’s influence in national policy-making. When students from elite colleges, trained in efficiency and profit, gain positions of influence, corporate values dictate how they view the world. These corporate values, in turn, make possible some of the U.S.’s more barbarous policies. Polanco specifically cited the U.S.’s bloody role in 1980’s Nicaragua. He additionally referenced working conditions in the anti-union south—where multitudes of citizens earn starvation wages. Regarding Dartmouth, Polanco said, “When people suffer here, no one ever talks about it.” This conspiracy of silence—this habit of ignoring—then follows graduates to the halls of power, where habit becomes law.

At the start of the discussion, Professor Rickford asked, “How can we create a more equitable working world at our campus and beyond?” Surely, a place to begin is with events like this. Apathy on campus partially derives from ignorance. How many students are aware of the most recent benefit cuts? How many know that some Dartmouth employees can’t afford to take their children to the hospital?

Thus, discussions like this educate; they inform us of the suffering within our community. And yet, if we hope to create a better world, we must also examine ourselves. For surely, ignorance alone is not the source of the world’s troubles. Rather, we all experience fundamental consumerist, individualistic, and narcissistic tendencies which isolate us from our fellow human beings. We are taught from a young age that little matters beyond personal advancement. Our corporate and consumer society provides us with no moral education, but rather images of the beautiful, successful people we can become—if only we work hard in school, or buy that pair of jeans. We are trained to care only about ourselves. Consequently, the assault on workers continues, largely unchallenged.

Now, more than ever, we must ask ourselves what it means to be members of the Dartmouth community. At this elite institution—at this pinnacle of education and privilege—employees are unable to take their children to the hospital. At this bastion of enlightenment, ideals of justice and democracy are trampled beneath the imperative of efficiency. We must question these trends. We must challenge corporatism and individualism. And we must work to reassert our humanity and to establish justice at Dartmouth and beyond.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see… that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
-Henry David Thoreau

As the mid-winter cold descends, the war machine rolls on free of any friction or restraint. Come October 2011 the War in Afghanistan will be ten years old. It has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, along with thousands of U.S., coalition and Afghan troops. The larger War on Terror has expanded to two continents as the CIA carries out covert and illegal military operations in countries as varied as Yemen, Kenya, and Tajikistan. Thus far, the U.S. has spent nearly $400 billion in Afghanistan. It will likely spend another $119 billion in 2011. Little progress has been made in defeating the Taliban. Particularly damning is a private statement made by General Petraeus: “I don’t think you win this war… This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

To pursue his war, President Obama has reneged on campaign promises and ignored the voices of the American majority opposed to it. To what avail, then, this endless death and suffering, this abandonment of the democratic principles of our country?

The War in Afghanistan should not be reduced to the status of mere “strategic blunder.” I am not suggesting that had the Taliban been routed, had civilian casualties been halved, this war would be justified. Any such critique, which confines itself to the moral void of “strategy,” is as irresponsible as it is parochial, for it leaves unchallenged the institutional structures of power most responsible for our aggression. It allows propagandists to justify future wars with allegedly “better” intelligence. It allows unjust wars to occur again. And again.

The war must instead be challenged as morally and fundamentally wrong. The idea of American exceptionalism, which encourages the U.S. to occupy any country it “deems” threatening—to ignore international law and commit crimes against humanity—must be rebuked. Only then, will we be able to challenge the legitimacy of the war machine. This is not a matter of policy, of the Democratic/Republican divide, or the internal workings of the CIA. Rather, war, in this country, transcends party-lines and generation gaps. It culminates in historical and everlasting imperialism. The American state is a military-industrial complex that draws on nearly all sectors of the economy. It is an inertial behemoth, unresponsive to the statutes of international law or the voices of public opinion. It feeds on profit and death. After devastating one country, it moves to the next, destroying economies and lives. It is a machine, and it must be stopped.

Appeals to mainstream channels of power are useless. Obama, elected in part for his anti-war message, has betrayed the public by expanding and prolonging the war. As Israel-Iran tensions build, U.S. involvement in Iran seems inevitable. Elected Democratic representatives are now virtually powerless to stop American aggression. What choice, then, is left for those who despise war, for those who morally and fundamentally oppose such policies, to voice their opposition? How does one confront and challenge the barbarity of our war state?

On December 16, 2010, 131 activists—myself included—chose the route of civil resistance. Led by anti-war group Veterans for Peace, we illegally stood against the White House fence, demanding that Obama end his policy of endless war. One by one we were handcuffed, photographed, placed in paddy wagons, and driven to Anacostia Detention Center. Along with a majority of veterans, those arrested included Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, and CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. After hours in jail, we were released. Those who refused to pay the small fine were given court dates.

Moral acts of protest and civil resistance ideally move from isolated events to broad cultural movements. Starting with just a few individuals, they can grow to include millions and produce lasting and dramatic effects on society. Both the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam movement are examples to this end. At the December 16 protest, we hoped that our work might inspire a similarly broad movement. Yet no one doubted the enormity of the task ahead. None of us underestimated the perseverance that would be required. The War in Afghanistan, for most Americans, lacks the immediacy of Vietnam or of Civil Rights. With no draft, only a minority of citizens, mainly soldiers and their friends and family, experience the war directly. The sorrow and trauma of combat is thus contained, perhaps to the preclusion of a broad, popular movement.

But there was another motivation for our actions. One simpler, more personal. Through my conversations with the veterans and my fellow activists, and through the speeches and the songs, this motivation sounded a clear, pure note. It was the moral imperative to oppose that which is wrong.

Mario Savio, speaking at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, aptly described this motivation. Addressing protestors, the leader of the Free Speech Movement spoke:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.

By leaving the structures of power unchallenged, we participate—if only passively—in the execution of its crimes. As the War in Afghanistan trudges on, all of us are partly responsible. Our tax dollars, our economic output, even our symbolic allegiance to the U.S. allow the war to continue. The burden of war rests not only on the shoulders of policy makers, but on ours too.

Thus, only active opposition to the war will lessen our complicity. Protest, civil resistance, speeches, articles—these all, if ever so slightly, work to this end. The goal of an anti-war movement is peace. And yet, in the absence of this accomplishment, we must not believe that our efforts have been wasted. If one solitary veteran, suffering from the trauma of war, sees a protest and knows that she has not been abandoned, then all our work will be justified. If by merely holding a sign, encourages a passerby to consider an issue previously insignificant to him, then all our efforts will likewise be justified. And if by rmerely efusing to give up, by refusing to descend to indifference—by working day after day, year after year to combat injustice—we keep warm the embers of hope, then our efforts, our lives, will be justified.