A lot of people came in with a personal ethos of militancy. But there were also a lot of people who just had really strong convictions about, and anger toward, the American empire and the ongoing genocide. The camaraderie that was established in those first hours was what fueled people to act militantly, even if they hadn’t done so before. Seeing that the police were attacking a community that was joined together in an explicit rejection of something very obviously wrong, that was what empowered people to act with incredible strength and conviction.
People on this campus don't have it like in New York. It's very easy to start a student organization if you are an NYU student, you can go to The New School and talk to the people that have started the organization on their campus and they'll send a representative over and there's like a very clear, sort of like, methodical way that this happens. There will also always be, like, a group of 50 year old Trotskyites and 35 year old Maoist who are ready to start an organization at your school and put you on the golden path, right?
But here, there's absolutely none of that infrastructure.
And so, people have to think creatively, people take their cues from other places. Instead of having these counterintuitive, like ways of acting that are proposed, often by student organizations or various sort of like leftist organizations in general, people took cues from one another.
Read the rest at The New Inquiry
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