Remember the Yard

I think I first heard the news from a blockmate. It wasn’t like we didn’t all see it coming, but somehow I wasn’t fully prepared for the news.

We were at war.

For the past few months, the country had been watching the President stitch together a justification for the invasion of Iraq. The end result was a complicated combination of fear, anger, and hope: fear of weapons of mass destruction, anger that “they” had attacked us, and hope for a better Iraq. A majority of the nation—and a vast majority of our elected officials—seemed to buy Bush’s story. The rest of us grew angry and frustrated. We waited for some great national discussion, some reasoned debate where “our” leaders would stand up to the administration and challenge Bush’s claims and his ideology. The discussion never happened. Bush spoke, and we were at war.

As Bush tried to “shock and awe” the Iraqi people, a thousand students walked out of their classes to protest the President’s action. They joined 4,000 protesters in Harvard Yard and hundreds of thousands across the country. This action was only the first in what became a growing trend; the past two years have seen a huge rise in student participation in politics. Students canvassed for presidential candidates, donated to political campaigns, and came out and voted in record numbers during the 2004 election. During that election, students also developed an increasingly negative opinion of the war in Iraq. According to a poll conducted by our own Institute of Politics, college student support for the war fell from 65 percent in April of 2003, to 47 percent on the eve of the election. The same poll showed the war in Iraq was among the most important issues to student voters.

I remember feeling like I was somebody else. I dove into Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, then the Kerry campaign. Watching my generation start to pay attention, first to the war and then to the election, I felt like we could really accomplish something. I felt like I was witnessing a movement, one of those massive changes I’d be telling my grandkids about.

Then came November. I won’t rehash the incredible geyser of all things putrid that was November 2. Nor will I replay the soul-searching, finger-pointing, sobbing, and cursing that went on afterwards. The important thing, the shocking thing, is that life went on. Bombs continued to fall, soldiers continued to die, the economy sputtered and rose and sputtered some more—and life went on.

Then a few weeks ago, at a concert, the performer mentioned that there would be a rally on March 20 to “end the war in Iraq.” I was shocked. What could he possibly be talking about? The war wasn’t an issue anymore. We’d tried; we’d failed. The warmongers had won.

My reaction startled me a little bit. Like the rest of the country, I’ve watched as more than 1,500 American soldiers and as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died. But when the performer suggested I come to an anti-war rally, my first impulse was that he must be confused. I found myself thinking that the war is a dead issue.

It turns out not everybody has this reaction—two thousand Bostonians rallied against the war last Sunday. But despite the die-in staged by Harvard students outside the Science Center on Friday, I can’t help feeling that the activist spirit that pervaded Harvard two years ago has died. We as a school, and maybe as a generation, have gone back to our day jobs. We’ve lost that spark of anger that led us (literally) out of our classrooms and into the streets. We’ve lost that sense of hope that made us believe we were really participating in one of those movements that will change history.

Part of this seeming complacency may be due to legitimate confusion about what should be done next. Even as we see more and more evidence that the war was a bad idea, we don’t know what should be done about it. Friends of mine who thought the war was a ridiculous idea think we have to keep U.S. troops in the country until something good happens.

But what makes me sad isn’t the disagreements about policy or the feeling that things aren’t as bad as they could be. It’s that students feel like the time for action has passed. At 20 and 21 years old we’re already looking back on two years ago as the time when we were young and naïve. I find myself feeling like I’ve lost my outrage. I’ve spent it on the war, on the election, on the Republicans and the Democrats and those politicians who seem to be a blend of both. As I mark the second anniversary of a continuing atrocity I can’t even spare the energy to be properly pissed off.

I’m not asking anybody to drop what they’re doing and throw stones at a federal building. I respect people’s indecision about what to do next, and I respect those who maintain some hope that everything will turn out just fine in the end. But for those who did something in the last two years to change this country’s leadership, for those who walked out of class or talked to voters or just attended a rally: remember what it felt like to know that you could change it all.

Sam M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.