The Apathy Lie

I believe that the rhetoric surrounding the apathy of college students is an excuse for bad organizing. More than ever, college students are engaged with their lives and politics – and I don’t just mean this in the liberal-Kos/Obama sense. At the risk of sounding cliché, Students define and redefine themselves constantly through Facebook and MySpace, and go to great lengths to involve themselves by participating in (innocuous but telling) activism related to incurable disease and apparently incurable conflicts like that in Darfur. Even this doesn’t get to the core of the issue: students are motivated now more than every to pursue individual ends through the traditional means of power. The most powerful academic institution on any college campus blessed with their presence is the business school. I’ve seen students line up out the door to win free chicken at Chik-fil-a in Georgia, I’ve seen similar fervor for Broadway tickets and on campus events at NYU. The belief that these things represent nothing more than apathy willfully ignores the time and personal investments required to do them; it also demonstrates a woeful arrogance that the complainer simply knows better than anyone else what the real issues to be organized around are. I’ve seen lots of people get worked up about the lack of student protest against the war in Iraq, I’ve never seen a student praised for organization against environmental degradation or copyright politics. The issue selection and tactics choices of most of the mainstream anti-war movement is poor – I don’t even know why ending the Iraq war at this point would be anti-war, except in a facile sense. Even if it was, I don’t see why the amount of time taken to dislodge an oil-driven, well financed occupation makes sense in comparison to the ongoing war of poverty and sexual violence in America. Apathy, no; disregard towards the traditional quasi-fascist bullshit of the old guard left, more likely. Students do things. Lots of things. They just do things according to a different economy of attention and focus than has ever really been seen before. I’ll be honest: the most interesting and engaged activism I’ve seen did not come from either a political party or the traditional organs of the anti-war movement: it came from people my age or in school still (standing in front of trucks, marching through DC with masks, disclosure meetings at NYU, hanger-selling at UGA, Rhizome in Austin, fuck, every Critical Mass ride I’ve ever been on). What other people see as apathy more likely constitutes taking the reigns of power out of their hands. I don’t believe in an messianic transformation of the public sphere centering on the power of the internet and communications technology, but I do know that things are different for me than they were for other people in the past.

Duncan