What is it about our counterparts in Québec? I mean the students. Do they have uncomfortable mattresses? Do their parents feed them tainted cheese, because that’s all they eat anyway?

What’s wrong with them?

Why are the students in the province of Québec mobilizing en masse to protest the province’s cutback of $103 million in grants and bursaries? Why are these students on strike when Québecers pay the lowest tuition in the country, at an average of $1,800? For fuck’s sake, that’s only 10 per cent of my student debt (about $18,000)-and I’m only in my second year.

Ontario’s students pay some of the highest tuition fees in the country. We’re assailed by fat-cat former premiers who advocate outrageous modes of student loans (income-contingent loan repayment plans-try saying that ten times fast) that everybody first thinks are rosy-cheeked-mwah-love-you-Bob-Rae-have-my-children-be-my-university’s-president-but are more aptly described as life-long debt sentences that are going to bring in the bling for the banking industry.

If we good Ontarians can allow ourselves to be gouged by $5,000 on average in tuition fees, why the hell can’t those Frenchies shut up and do the same?

What’s wrong with them? Why do they naïvely continue to believe that mobilization of the masses with support from various sectors will make a difference to the power distribution in this state of affairs that some call a democracy, but which Malcolm X called a disguised hypocrisy?

Maybe … because it will?

Let’s not be such dimwits as to believe that the Liberals of Québec-led by a man who was at one point a loser leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, Jean Charest-will give in completely to the demands of the students. But even if their struggle does not completely bring about the change they want to see, are they not correct to stand up for their rights?

What are we, the students of Ontario, going to tell our children when they go to university and face thousands of dollars in tuition fees, massive tuition debts, professors sponsored by ExxonMobil and classrooms sponsored by ING Direct?

That we refuse to mobilize and therefore silently and painfully acquiesce, because we believe that action does not bring about change anyway? Are we telling ourselves that, yes, we will go down without a fight-because it’s not that bad, right?

It’s not that bad?

I’m in my second year of university, I have $18,000 in debt and I don’t even own a credit card! I make excuses not to go out places, most of my clothes are gifts, my parents try to prevent me from buying gifts for my niece on Eid and her birthday, I sometimes find myself without enough money to buy textbooks, and I shudder before I buy a $2 hotdog from those hotdog stands outside Sidney Smith … well, I would shudder even if I were loaded … Anyway, there are plenty of fellow students who have it much worse than I can even begin to fathom.

The fact is that it is bad now. Unless we stand up and fight for our rights now, we face telling our children that “we didn’t start the fire, son, no, but we, uh, tried to, uh, stop listening to Billy Joel … actually we got burned and burnt out like pussies.”

There’s something wrong when we’re more concerned with the hockey lockout than Rae’s report, when we loudly debate pseudo-reality television but shy away from and feel uncomfortable discussing public policy.

I will not, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., be disappointed by the fervour of those who were opposed to me, but by the silence and inaction of those who should have supported me.

Even if I lose the struggle, and I think I will, I will rest secure in the knowledge that I never acquiesced.

Et toi?