Five tips for Gaza protestors returning to their elite colleges
Pick up where you left off
Jeffrey Denny
Back to school is an exciting time for college students.
You get to see classmates again, settle into your dorms, meet new professors, learn more about the world, and solve the Gaza crisis.
After resting up all summer — maybe at your family’s lavish seaside or mountain retreat if you’re Ivy or Little Ivy — you’re ready to camp out, occupy, cosplay, make noise for media attention that triggers the hegemony, feel part of something bigger than you and righteously feed your self esteem that you care more about genocide than anyone.
This is all part of the normal college journey. These five tips will make the 2024–25 protest college year the best ever:
1. Learn new chants
Out: “Biden Biden you can’t hide/you’re committing genocide.” In: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide!”
As a free thinker who’s too smart to vote or swallow propaganda, you can speak your personal truth by selecting from a menu of powerful slogans suggested by the pro-Hamas group Within Our Lifetime on its website.
Don’t be silenced by worry over being called “Champagne Marxist” by the right-wing media or a useful fool for Trump who will make Gaza worse. Silence=violence!
2. Topple the college president
Gaza is their fault. Lock the power that be into a lose-lose situation by disrupting the campus, seizing a building and enjoying your First Amendment rights to chant ethnic hate. Like the Unite the Right neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.
This way, you can unite the right-wing politicians and left-wing regents to vilify the president and pressure them out. As genocidal Marxist dictators teach, victory is all about planting heads on spikes as a warning to enemies.
Don’t worry if your college president is a woman of color who worked hard all their lives to break through the white Western male cis colonial patriarchy that has dominated academia.
3. Celebrate your cognitive dissonance
Your Marxist gender studies probably don’t require violence to your agency by making you read the white Western male cis colonial patriarchal misogynist author F. Scott Fitzgerald except to “interrogate” him.
But having beaten 99% of college applicants in America to get into a top college, you surely pass his test of a first-rate intelligence, “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
For instance, you’re loud and proud that you hate hate more than anyone. You’ve even ruined progressive tenured professors with families for inadvertently misgendering and making you feel unsafe because he/him/his confused agender with genderfluid among the seven main genders and 72 sub-genders.
But you don’t mind making Jewish students feel unsafe — that’s on them for bombing Gaza. You’re a cognitive dissident!
Also, don’t worry about ignoring the other current genocides on the Genocide Watch list, like in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Manipur, India and Ukraine. Or the genocide that led to the creation of Israel as a safe space for Jewish people. Or abusing and draining genocide of its meaning like the overuse of narcissist, which of course you’re not.
4. Check your privilege
Like checking baggage, whether for flights or dating sites, don’t be ashamed of your privileges — embrace them.
Coming from a capitalist family wealthy enough to afford your elite $100,000/year private college with a 3% acceptance rate and advanced opportunities in life demands the noble obligation to ladder up the less fortunate.
Previous generations called it noblesse oblige. You might call it “biting the hand that feeds,” which is more satisfying if you hate your parents who are richer in money than in expressing love.
With your first-rate intelligent cognitive dissonance, don’t worry about hypocrisy. Like if your family’s wealth that’s paying for your college includes stocks of companies that might do business in Israel. Demand they disclose and defund!
But that doesn’t mean you should have to get a working-class job to help with tuition. That would cut into saving Gaza.
5. Plan your future
Every hero in recent history — from Gandhi to King to you — made sacrifices to serve humanity. Even the warmongering U.S. Marines agree that freedom is not free.
As you sacrifice taking classes, studying, making decent grades and other students to save Gaza, your cheugy commencement speaker, should you graduate, will urge you to pay your privilege forward. Whether at the Starbucks drive-through for your bespoke $10 drink or wearing your fashion Keffiyeh while working at a Hamas nonprofit PR agency.
You’re not among those capitalist money-grubbing students, including the star underprivileged who had to earn a scholarship. You’re not a craven careerist who works hard for a degree to get a job and pay for student loans, groceries or rent. You teach these timid souls by personal example that college is not a place to raise your future. College is about changing the world even if you don’t whatsoever.
You shoulder an historic burden.
Ever since Columbia University student protestors defeated genocidal dictators from Genghis Khan to Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and yes, Adolph Hitler, you — our new generation of elite students — suffer from over-expectation bordering on exploitation.
This puts too much pressure on you, our future leaders, who are already experiencing self-diagnosed clinical anxiety whether from parental overcoddling, social media, how the world and life are worse than ever, or addiction to over-caffeinated beverages.
However you heroically manage to balance the demands of self and humanity at college, Gaza anxiously awaits your solutions.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
