For the Love of Gaza, Bring Back the Students So They Can Bring the War Home Again
Image by Steel Brooks.
I was born and raised in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small-town cowering in the shadow of a vast college metropolis known simply as State College and I fucking hate State College. I hate State College because nine months out of the year State College is the home of Penn State University, a massive tax-funded corporation that floods my otherwise bucolic corner of nowhere with an ocean of football rape culture and the faceless swarm of brats standing in line to go into debt just to be a part of it.
Needless to say, as a recovering agoraphobic with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I generally count the minutes until June when these alcoholic tourists finally fuck off for a few months so I can actually drive to my therapist’s office without having flashbacks in the heat of a goddam traffic jam. But this year, I find myself in a strange new predicament. For the first time in my life, I find myself begging Kali goddess of destruction to bring those brats back.
What the hell could inspire such seemingly contradictory behavior, you ask? Perhaps yet another mental illness? Yes, a global pandemic known as holocaust, but for once I’m not the one inflicted by this demented disorder, the political establishment of the western world is. You see, there is a genocide raging across the Gaza Strip and while the racist apartheid state of Israel may be providing the shock troops on the ground wiping an impoverished population from the face of the planet, it is the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union that make this savage final solution possible.
America alone has delivered nearly 30,000 bombs to Israel since the tragic blowback of October 7 gave them the greenlight to kill. The official body count delivered by that arsenal stands at a staggering 40,000+, over 16,000 of them children. That is 2% of Gaza’s entire population. However, medical experts at The Lancet believe that the miasma of indirect devastation that comes with this level of total war likely puts the death toll somewhere between 149,000 and 598,000, the latter would place around 15% of Gazan’s underground, easily making this bloodbath one of the most devastating genocides of the last century.
So, what do all these grim statistics have to do with Penn State University? The only reason why half the people in this country even knows that this massacre is occurring is because of the holy fucking hell that campus brats across the country have raged over it. Last spring, universities from sea to shining sea became virtual battlegrounds as legions of college students put down their bongs to take to the streets and demand that these institutions cut their ties to genocide. They occupied large swaths of property that their tuitions maintain with encampments on at least 75 campuses across the country and this movement quickly spilled out into the streets with students haunting Democrats and Republicans alike at every possible public appearance and campaign stop with heckling catcalls and profane accusations.
The Democrats responded by working in tandem with universities and local police to suffocate this uprising in its cradle. The Biden Administration has even quietly admitted to coordinating and overseeing the ensuing crackdowns that turned these campuses into open air prisons flooded with heavily armed gestapo in riot gear, flogging and gassing peaceful protestors before dragging them off to jail. Over 2,000 students were arrested across the country in a massive sweep against free speech. It didn’t work. More protestors came. The Republicans responded by calling to bring in the National Guard and soldiers with rifles were spotted at several campus events in the Midwest, just a stone’s throw away from the killing fields of Kent State.
As if the violence wasn’t enough, these kids were also dragged through the mud by every corporate news hole from the New York Times to Fox News who slurred them as terrorists and antisemites. But they just kept coming. These pissed-off kids were joined by legions of equally pissed-off Muslims and together this unlikely coalition boldly threatened to deprive the Democrats of the pivotal swing state of Michigan with over 100,000 of them voting uncommitted during the party’s one-candidate primary.
Soon the same Democrats who were siccing the pigs on these kids just weeks earlier began paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire even while the weapons continued to flow to Tel Aviv. Something wonderful had happened. The system learned to fear their children’s wrath again. Then the bell rang, and class was dismissed but the genocide just kept on burning.
If anything, it’s only gotten worse. While the pressure from Michigan undoubtedly helped force an increasingly decrepit Genocide Joe from office, Kamala Harris has changed nothing but the brand image. That Bay Area prison warden may be skulking around to kiss Bibi’s ring behind closed doors but she’s still passing that butcher checks with one hand while wagging a virtue signaling finger with the other. Thus, this August brought more gift-wrapped hardware and killing sprees to the Holy Land. The administration that Kamala still actively serves in approved a $20 billion dollar arms deal to Israel that included 50 F-15 fighter jets while Netanyahu used their existing fleet to bomb no fewer than 13 shelters, including 9 schools in 8 days.
Even worse, Israel and its sponsors seem to be signaling their intentions to expand the massacre across the region to every corner of the map where people have dared to stand with the Palestinian people. While increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure in South Lebanon, Israel has also taken to assassinating possible negotiators in Iran and firebombing oil facilities in Yemen. For their part, America is surrounding their mad dog proxy with an armada of battleships that now includes both the USS Abraham and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The message here is clear. With no cantankerous students upsetting the elites at their universities there is simply no reason for these imperial arsonists not to turn up the heat.
The Democrats are hoping that their kids will cool off by fall while they sell Kamala on TikTok as some kind of breath of fresh air in the gas chamber. It is my sincere hope that these kids come back as pissed-off as I am and resist falling victim to the delusions of electoral democracy in a failed empire. Even if they weren’t rigged, an election has never ended a war in this country, but students have when they’ve tossed over the ballot box and stuck to the streets where real democracy happens.
Richard Nixon won the biggest landslide in electoral history in 1972 against George McGovern, the only real pacifist the Democratic Party has ever nominated. But within a year, the troops were home from Vietnam and Nixon was out of office because the campus protests had spread to military bases and lead to widescale mutinies and acts of sabotage. The Pentagon folded out of fear of losing control over their own soldiers and an already paranoid and pill-popping Nixon collapsed beneath the pressure.
This is what we need now to end the slaughter in Gaza, and I believe that the brilliantly obnoxious student agitators of the BDS Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace have what it takes if they’re willing to take this motherfucker to the next level.
This means increasing the occupations, openly boycotting the elections, doxing corporate warmongers on campus, and generally making America unlivable for the people who profit off of genocide. I also hope that this movement doesn’t stop with Gaza, that these kids make the same demands for America’s other victims in places like Yemen, Syria, West Papua, Haiti, and the Donbas, and that every student with a conscience in this country becomes another monkey-wrench in the gears of the rusty battleship we call empire.
I still fucking hate Penn State and the shadow it casts over my tiny hillbilly sanctuary. But I will bomb through the crowded campus streets of State College with my face buried in a brown paper bag and my fist raised high above my Ford Taurus if it means siccing these kids on the war machine. I will embrace my agoraphobia like a dangerous lifestyle choice if it means spreading the fear to the powerful. Kali help me, but for the love of Gaza, bring back the students so they can bring the war home again where it belongs.
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