One of our most precious rights in America is the right to peacefully assemble. Across this country, protesters on college campuses are peaceably assembling with tents and signs, sometimes stopping traffic, but these latest protests are basically ‘sit ins’ that are a classic of the genre that give oppressed voices an outlet to state contrary opinions, and it’s a credit to this great country that somewhere in America, we allow it to happen in almost every place and on almost every day of the week. The subject drawing the most protest lately is the conduct of the State of Israel since the atrocious Hamas terrorist attack.

Israeli President Netanyahu has said about the American university protests, it’s “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped.” Stopped. Verboten. At MIT and Harvard, ain’t no stoppin’ these protests from happening, tell you that, short of summer break, and as far as I’m concerned, better to protest on the bucolic campuses of America’s fine colleges and universities than blocking traffic and breaking the laws of social order on American streets. In this country, we allow citizens to peacefully assemble, but there’s always a limit to free speech as soon as it affects the rights of others (corporate ‘persons’ can sit this one out) so, where better than America’s greatest institutions, on the international stage in front of the world’s people who flock here to attend these very same great institutions of higher learning to strut our argumentative stuff.

When Hamas attacked innocent Israeli civilians, sparking the powder keg that they fully intended to see blow up into a war, they knew that Netanyahu was always going to overreact to the blatant oversight (being a conservative, especially) and his failure to foresee and prevent the attack, much like George W. Bush always going to overreact after the horror and embarrassment of 9/11, invading Iraq instead of finishing the job right in Afghanistan, Netanyahu has predictably gone the war route and has nearly obliterated Palestine, both the place and its people, and he ain’t stoppin’ yet either. The notion of “a war on your own people” is exactly what’s going on in the Holy Land and I say this about many places in the world, Ireland and Haiti are but two examples where people have done and are doing this, everywhere else, it’s mostly just a political ‘war,’ between cultures and classes of people but a war nonetheless over land, capital distribution and political power.

In democracies, the hot passions of protest and disagreement are cooled with a generous set of laws protecting free speech, born from our founding as a dissenting nation from England’s Kings and Queens, we have the right to say what we want and to meet and to protest shit, the only limits are written into law and can be argued in front of a judge. So protesters: please don’t block the traffic, the working people on the #1 bus certainly don’t get won over to your cause getting home late for dinner with the family. Also, wars in Africa and the Ukraine War are bad enough for everyone to deal with, so we don’t need another stupid war added to the stupid waste of lives and resources we are witnessing in the Middle East and Israel, and the best way to make peace happen is to be righteous. Be stupid and you will fall away into powerlessness and obscurity. So don’t block traffic and don’t kill people. Be right and win.

Carl Holt
May 16, 2024