Coat Check [chat]
Heart Coat Check Girl.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" - Obi-Wan Kenobi
Disagree?
Students and Staff at IU Bloomington have planned a strike
for April 11th and 12th. This has received
some attention from
The Nation, and the strike, itself, has a tumblr page. Because how are you supposed to fight the man
without a tumblr page? Combing through the
tumblr one can find a plethora of grievances mixed with hopeful idealism. As one image on the site articulates:
"The goal is to contest the
administration's efforts to make IU a more exclusive, costly institution, at
the expense of students and staff. We have already forced the administration to
acknowledge these issues, but through collective action, we want to push
further so that we can imagine together a different future for IU."
The goal of the strike is to contest, to push, to imagine. As the
demands page says, the goal is, "to foster discussion and encourage action". There be discontent, and this discontent
needs to be articulated. What is
curious, however, are some terms that are absent from the site:
-
Solution
-
Proposal
-
Answer
They're
as mad as hell. They aren't going to
take it anymore. But fuck if they know
how to get where they want to be, how they can solve the problem. This is troubling.
For
one thing, their lack of forethought, planning, and basic economic skills
results in untenable demands. Let's look
at their six preliminary demands:
1) Immediately reduce tuition and eliminate
fees.
2) Stop Privatization and outsourcing at IU.
3) End the wage freeze.
4) The university must honor its promise to
double the enrollment of African-American students to 8%.
5) Abolish both HB1402 and SB590.
6) No retaliation for participating in or
organizing the strike.
Notice
1 and 3? 1 requires that the University
decrease the amount of money it take in.
3 requires that the University increase staff / faculty salaries, and so
push more money out. So, our helpful
protesters have demanded that IU collect less money, but dole out larger
checks. My guess is that no math / econ students,
or faculty, participated in the construction of that list.
Let's
be clear: Each particular demand, itself, is
not troubling or problematic. Having a
strike or demonstration is fine and dandy.
Communicating unrest and voicing opposition to trends? Go for it.
But there is a difference between criticism and constructive
criticism. Criticism is people yelling and
dancing around wearing Guy Fawkes masks.
Constructive criticism is people articulating their grievances, and
offering some fucking solutions to the god damned problem. It's taking the step beyond mere vocalization
of unrest, and striving for resolution.
This
is the general problem with contemporary civil unrest, with campus strikes and
the Occupy Wall Street movement. They're
great at complaining and not showering.
But when it comes time to sit down and articulate a practical solution
nothing happens. The people in the drum
circle can imagine a better world, can articulate their imagined possible
reality, but have no fucking clue how to get from where we are, to what they
want to be.
It
seems like that would be a critical step:
A woman in the drum circle stands up and says, "And here is my Excel
document with cost breakdowns for how we can transition from the current
economic paradigm to a more palatable system." But that won't happen, because instead of
learning economic theory and the inter-workings of University bureaucracy the
fucker was busy learning to play a djembe.
My
guess is that their website has not exhausted its server space. So, if they had solutions they could have
made a "How to solve the problem" page. But they didn't make the page, so they
probably don't have the solutions.
It's just like Hugh Laurie sang:
Posted by _J_ at 7:37 PM 0 comments