Eating Pizza and Protesting at Harvard, and Elsewhere

HARVARD IS THE WORLD'S wealthiest university, but at the beginning of the third millennium, (which was 2001, not 2000 as widely believed), janitors and cooks on campus were being paid minimum wage. You can't live on minimum wage in Boston. You crowd into small apartments or trailers, live in your car, or go homeless on minimum wage. Harvard, like nearly all American universities, is a bastion of intellectual, do gooder liberals. In 2001 a group of do gooder student activists presented a petition to the Harvard powers that be, asking for a living wage for workers. The petition was ignored. Out came the people, placards, and pickets. Another rebuff from the elite, above on high. Not to be denied (never let it be said that Harvardians are quitters), the teeming mob entered the University President's office, and stayed, with friends passing pizza through the window. Soon the hallowed halls and manicured lawns were inundated with swarming complainers, chanting, singing, snacking. UP showed Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Harvard alums. Up showed the news media. Game on, fun just beginning. The scene become an embarrassment for the ruling aristocracy and its billionaire benefactors, who finally caved. The older I get, the more convinced I become that something similar must transpire across the fruited plain, in order to save the country, if America is to survive the crushing burden of pervasive racial and economic inequality which will, if not addressed, result in far worse consequences ( worse than protesting); it will result in societal collapse. In 1932 thirty thousand World War One veterans, American heroes, walked into Washington D.C. and occupied Wall St., aka Pennsylvania avenue, hungry depression plagued heroes demanding payment for their service to country. President Hoover called them "communists" and "traitors", and did nothing, in typical conservative fashion. Officers Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower shot at them like dogs and drove them out of town, and Franklin Roosevelt said to Mrs. Roosevelt "I will be the next President, whether I bother to campaign or not". So, it can happen, and very nearly has. In the election of 1932 FDR did indeed landslide over Hoover, while one million Americans voted for communist and socialist candidates. Typically thoughtless conservatives think, or pretend to think, that those who describe social injustice are the cause of it, or are imagining it. This attitude is either denial, or downright evil. We need to conserve little of the current system, and we need to liberate most of it, by whatever means necessary. And if we do not, to Quote Bertolt Brecht: "there shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them". To quote the French Revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".