Day of Discovering Neverness

Happy May Day, comrades! Today is May 1, Day of Discovering Neverness according to the Universal Solar Calendar, but it's International Workers Day across much of the world. A luta continua. 

Water Dissolves Water stands with the brave students and their partners protesting for an end to the genocide in Gaza. Today, protestors against the killings of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children have erected encampments and seized academic buildings at universities from New York to Los Angeles. Despite police brutality, encampments around the country are still standing and demonstrators say they will not back down.

Law-and-order types are complaining it's gone too far and for too long. It's one thing, they argue, to organize a peaceful and permitted parade holding placards and signs against the genocide, but there's no call for illegal encampments and occupation of buildings. And certainly don't disrupt traffic where hard-working men and women totally uninvolved and not responsible for the are crisis are just trying to get to work. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters that students who had occupied campus buildings were going beyond their right to peaceful protest.

Bullshit. I'm from the 60s, and remember the "bring the war home" protests against Vietnam. It's hard to imagine more suffering than is going on right now in Gaza and it's hard to name a crisis more demanding of the world's attention. Protest should be - must be - disruptive and confrontational if it's going to wake people up and spur people to take action. 

But under the guise of "law and order," more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested on U.S. campuses since April 18, often by militarized police.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York sent officers in riot gear to clear a building that had been occupied for only about a day, and then proudly announced that some 300 protestors have been arrested at CCNY and Columbia. The demonstrators at CCNY were arrested after some of them tried to take over an administrative building up in Harlem. Columbia’s campus is now closed to everyone but the students who live there and employees who provide essential services. 

Counter-protesters violently attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators at UCLA, and police allowed the clashes to continue for hours before they finally intervened before dawn. 

At the University of Arizona, campus police sprayed students with chemicals to break up a demonstration. At Tulane, 14 people were arrested as campus police were assisted by state and local forces to disperse the protesters. Protestors at Cal State Polytechnic University in Humboldt took over an administrative building for eight days before police ended the occupation, and after police moved into an encampment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, arresting about 30 people, protesters returned later the same day.

Don't back down and don't give up. End the genocide now.