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| Community in Action's Farce |
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| a 'riot' |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, November 19, 1986. The Annual Community in Action Therapy Session is over for the year despite the pontifications of their attention starved attorney. It is difficult to know what to compare this – quote – violent – end quote demonstration to. I am tempted to nudge it up aside the Hands Around Rocky Flats in years past, except that involved far more people – not enough, but far more. It probably accomplished more, also. What are the motivations of the plantlife involved? They claim, with no hope of seriousness, that they want to prevent the CIA from recruiting on campus, which the Agency has a legal right to do. They want to prevent students from being willingly able to apply. They harbor delusions of importance they might “arrest” the functionaries conducting the interviews. They want to stop the CIA’s war against the godless Sandinistas, for you right-wingers, or the CIA’s war against Nicaraguan children, for you with the Che posters. The violence was hardly that. It seems a chain fence was torn down, some knuckles got rapped, and a heavy wind blew Mace around far beyond the intended target. To what end the fence was torn down is puzzling, since the few timid souls flinching from nightsticks and expressing angry disbelief that cans marked ‘Mace’ contained ‘Mace’ would have made a sorry spectacle against police. In truth, what happened was a temper tantrum by Boulder’s Left that their numbers are smaller, their influence dwindling, their leadership laughable. The courageous souls venting their anger at the Contras by pulling down a fence merely underlined this. There lurks a belief that it was the student rebellions of the Vietnam Era that stopped the war. Not hardly, however buffeting that is to academics and aging radicals whose point of decline can be clearly placed in 1973. The war ended only when the middle level officer corps concluded that there was no military goal or purpose in Vietnam and pulled out after a decade of vicious, ludicrous combat. If you want to stop the CIA, here’s what to do. Pass a bill making their budget separate and, to a degree, open. There is no way – even with a majority of the people with you – that you can stop established channels of weapons and money flows. It sounds prosaic, boring, and too difficult. But it is in the long run, the only thing that will work. These tantrums by individuals with no constituency, influence, and respect from the average citizen does nothing but work against your goal and a worthwhile image. That’s presuming this country is your audience, and Central American justice your goal. The demise of Boulder’s Left into a clotting of humorous poseurs unhampered by courage, strategy, or the most basic organizational skills, coupled by the rise of right wing college morons is one of the least pleasant stories of the recent past. |
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