If you can’t make your opponent see the light with your rhetoric, try the cheery glow of some burning flags. That was the tack taken by the protesters who laid waste to a Canadian Alliance Association table during the anti-war rally at York yesterday, roughing up club president Yaakov Roth and trying to set his flags on fire before tearing them down. You can see some haggard organizer shaking his head now—“Okay, guys, we’re advocating peaceful, rational solutions, remember?”
We don’t know exactly what prompted the incident. Maybe it was the snow-day exuberance of too many kids skipping school. Maybe it was the pro-war pamphlets Roth was handing out. Well, guys, guess what: if Bush moves into Iraq tomorrow, it won’t be on a York campus group’s say-so. Conversely, some shredded pamphlets aren’t going to usher in a new era of Mideast peace.
Clearly these are young people who believe very strongly in their cause. In that case, they might want to stay away from said cause altogether. They’re doing more harm than good. Public Relations 101: Whatever you think is wrong with the world and however you plan to fix it, the rest of the world’s not going to buy in because you tell them to. Not even if you hold up traffic to give them the news right through their car window (as some other protesters at York did), and not even, believe it or not, if you go around overturning tables carrying arguments you don’t like.
None of this is really new or surprising. It’s increasingly easy to dismiss campus lefties as tantrumy children entranced by bright colours and loud noises, rather than a force for any sort of meaningful change. It’s just depressing when they make it even easier.
