AM New York

So every morning when I get out of the Path, I pick up a copy of AM New York and today's front cover made me laugh and me confused all in one:
Class Inaction: with wars and an unpopular president, why are today's college students staying silent?

I see this and laugh. They must not be hanging out at Columbia. I open up to the article and it's center picture is of the 1968 Columbia protests and the 2008 "peaceful protest of the Iraq war". Quiet my ass. That triangle was dinging through campus for days.

So my next thought is that clearly they decided to ignore the 2006 Minutemen protest and the fall 2007 hungerstrike. But they do blurb the Minutemen protests.

And then I read the article and I realized that I totally agreed with DAJ, SEAS'08 and one of the leaders/spokesman of the anti-Minutemen protests. It's funny how I'd gotten so annoyed with him because of his unwillingness to donate to the Senior Fund. Yet I agree with this point: "people feel like time and energy into schoolwork, or they fear they won't get that job they want when they graduate."

And while I totally agree with this I think there's another side to it. There jobs back then (1968) were scored by the connections you had. You went into banking, got into grad schools, and was given positions at firms based on who you knew. And being at a school like
Columbia was enough to make those connections. But now, most jobs are scored based ok actual merit. Of course having connections doesn't hurt but it doesn't always equal a job. However there is definitely one particular job category that is still based on networking: politics. And now looking back, the people that I knew in college who led the protests were all people who were interested in government or public offices: CK of the College Republicans and C4 founder, VR of the hunger strikers, MAK from my freshman floor who planned a trip to CNN to watch the results of the '04 election an is now working for a political publication.

So maybe the answer to more active protests is to encourage more students to go into politics.

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