Millennial Life: The Charge of Democracy
What is happening between Israel and Palestine isn't coming out of a vacuum, with constant conflict that I'm honestly not well-informed enough to detail. Advocates for either side are filled with emotion -- informed by religion, informed by generational trauma, informed by immediacy and vividness to death that we've rarely had access to in previous generations -- and emotion can cloud their advocacy. However, their emotions are valid -- and the lived experiences of others, especially minorities, should be honored.
So why was I charged with genocide? Because I'm now a turncoat to students that I had met with, agreed with, and even stopped by their university encampment to see how it was going. We sat in a coffee shop a few weeks before, and they gave statements and even gave me a binder of information with handwritten tabs. They had given me hope.
As the whirlwind started last week, I reached out to ask if they had contacted the Jewish community. They did not reply.
Advocacy also does not happen in a vacuum. It is built in community, and the frameworks change depending on who is in the community and their experiences. In that way, I also failed the students. I wasn't prepared enough to guide their advocacy and think through what they might need to do to be effective. I wasn't prepared to edit the resolution with my meager experience in global affairs. I didn't know either that we were preparing to pass this resolution on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
At the council meeting, the pro-Palestine group was escorted out by the police. They continued to yell in the lobby. The police chief got up to talk them into going to the front of the building. The news station cameras rolled. There's no such thing as bad press.
There were still two hours of public comment. Disturbing but unsurprising to me was that both sides were fraught with dangerous rhetoric, including direct threats to city council members. That says much more about our citizens, and likely our country, than anything else.
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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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