Trespassers
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in June 2024.
Meredith Sue Willis wrote a trilogy in the 1980’s, the final one entitled Trespassers. Her protagonist, Blair Ellen, later just Blair, is the only daughter of a teaching couple who discovers economic disparity in the Appalachian community in which she was raised, where friendship with hillbillies and the otherwise disadvantaged is not allowed ; racial disparity as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service To America, the equivalent of Canada’s Company of Young Canadians) in the black part of town somewhere in southern USA, where she organizes a food-buying cooperative; and personalized disparity in New York in 1967-68 where she is a recreation therapist in a rehab hospital for the long-term disabled and simultaneously a Columbia University student protesting the Vietnam war.
Blair explains to George Feathers, a self-described ‘afflicted but not unfortunate’ quadriplegic in Bellvue who is playing the stock market in order to make the money he needs to have a non-institutionalized life that ‘A protest is to make a point. It’s to make people think about things.’ Inside the protest, however, young people are thinking about a million different things, a clash of explanations and theories about the wrong they are feeling, the push and pull of rhetoric and charisma as they try to figure out collaborative action, the ambiguity of whether any action has external impact.
But certainly it has internal impact. Blair explains to George ‘I was part of something that was bigger than I am individually’ and shares her hope, maybe her belief, that enough small collective events would eventually make a difference. George is confident that is an illusion. And perhaps it is, but like George, Blair is taking action to change her world for the better. In so doing, she is creating herself and discovering the true character and ethics of those around her. They are all imperfect: the good guys own their imperfections and strive to improve. To win the internal war.
I think the current flush of campus protests may march to the same drummer. This generation of young people is also trying to make sense of a complex and troubled world, to take action with others to correct what’s wrong.
Is it ironic that this tranche of protesters is setting up encampments, just as the homeless have set up encampments in recent years? In both cases, the charge against them is not that their issue is wrong but that they are occupying land they have no right to be on. That was also the charge when universities and public buildings were occupied by the protesters of Blair’s generation. And of other protests and occupations over the years.
This suggests that ownership of land is the root of all problems. War: the carnage in Gaza and Israel is about who has the right to occupy that land. Colonialism: the Truth part of Truth and Reconciliation is that settlers displaced Indigenous people and consigned them to small and substandard bits of land. Refugees: people fleeing what they thought was their land and squatting in squalid conditions until someone, somewhere, at some time decides where they have the right to be. Resource extraction: where what is below the ground has more rights than what and who are above the ground. Homelessness: where some have more space than they can possibly use and others have none and no right to any.
But perhaps, as Blair says, we are seeking a place where we can act together, in concert. Where would that be? Where is the commons of our time? The village square has been replaced by privately-owned malls. Public buildings belong to the state which is not us. The streets belong to vehicles, the parks to the Rec Dept or the Crown, the schools and universities to their boards. Where do we have the right to gather in common? Remember when the internet was going to be the great gathering place, owned by the people for the people? That didn’t last long.
My Jewish friend who works on campus in Montreal tells me that the encamped students – if they are students, who knows? – are not Jews and Palestinians working out their differences, as I had thought might possibly be happening. She talked to a Quebecois mom whose son was inside. Why? Because he likes to cook and they need cooks. Does he know that the people who eat his food are carding Jewish students, ‘discouraging’ them from entering the campus? Does he care? Perhaps not: he has found a commons that values what he offers and that’s what matters.
Will the police open fire on student encampments as they did on protesting students at Kent State in 1970? Maybe. Unless the younger generation learns its place. And what is that place? Tell me, please.
