I do understand that my posts are outside the norm on the Hartford Listserv. I recently read a week’s worth of posts; the vast majority are announcements for events, or general classifieds. So to the extent readers want that and just that, I get it. I don’t want to be the troll, and I’m not trying to hinder the event announcement service that has served everyone well. So I will endeavor to keep longer things, unless they seem vitally important, to my website and the Valley News. (Even if Valley News didn’t correct the error I told them about in a previous writing, originally published here.) When I do post here, I’ll make a specific advertisement or ask of residents. Barring the occasional quote the length of a limerick.

One thing to maybe consider is that nearly all events advertised here are for get-togethers to discuss or educate about national/international issues that touch us in Hartford. Which has been my goal as well. So I’m curious where folks think the dividing line is. Perhaps it’s the content.

Here’s an event announcement: Wednesday May 1 at 5 p.m. on the Dartmouth green, students, professors and community members will gather in solidarity with Palestine, for a “Rally, concert, and dance party for liberation.” I hope you’ll join me there.

Did you know the first arrests of recent college protesters was at Dartmouth, a couple months back? Dartmouth set the precedent for what’s now happening around the country. But to students, perhaps Dartmouth was an inspiration. More than 100 campuses now feature permanent protest encampments. Reading the full list is eye-opening. (I’ve posted it at brandonsmith.com, along with a Part II to this column, and my five prior local writings.)

Dartmouth students and those at other colleges have a concrete demand: their institution’s divestment from companies that profit from occupation of Palestine and attacks on its people. That includes but is not limited to those who make weapons we’ve sent. There is precedent for this: in the ’80s, students forced their colleges to divest from apartheid South Africa. In recent years, many have been forced to divest from fossil fuels.

Folks have tried to say these protests don’t matter. And yet, the 30 largest U.S. university endowments, of which Dartmouth has one, control $493 billion of investment capital. It’s hard to comprehend big numbers, but someone making the U.S. median household income of $74,580 would need 6.6 million years to earn this much. Of the 30 schools in this heavy-hitters group, 26 currently have divestment encampments.

It also matters on a human scale. Displaced people in Gaza, forced to flee their homes and live in tents 10 or 20 miles south, have spray-painted on their tents “Thank you students,” “Thank you Columbia students,” and “Thank you students in solidarity with Gaza, your message has reached (us).”

To stay above-board, I do have an ask of Hartford residents today. It’s the same one asked of the attendees of the rally this past week: “The time is approaching when we will have to lay more on the line. When we’ll have to ask ourselves what we’re willing to put at risk to continue the work of liberation.” To get further involved, email uv4pal@gmail.com. To subscribe to the Upper Valley for Palestine newsletter, visit uv4pal.com/contact-us/

I imagine I’ll get some responses claiming “Hanover is not Hartford.” I encourage folks to see the reality which Hartford community leaders have expressed in recent public meetings: we can no longer think of Hartford, in certain key ways, as separate from other towns in the central Upper Valley. It’s been decades since these communities effectively integrated their economies. We may live in Hartford, but most of us work and spend in other towns nearby. Our friends are scattered. So to claim that persistent, justifiable protest at our local college isn’t relevant in Hartford feels like bad faith.

As we know, the economy Dartmouth generates for Hartford is huge. We benefit from that economy. Since Dartmouth invests in military contractors and companies that assist Israel’s occupation, *we benefit* from the profitability of Palestinians’ oppression and murder. The only way violent oppression and pointless warmaking stops happening, over and over, is if everyday people think about how they’re benefiting from the situation—and refuse to do so.

Don’t be swayed by talking heads: there have not been recorded incidents of violence from recent college protesters, unless you consider self-defense through the use of water cooler bottles. Video shows plenty of violent incidents from police. For us locally so far, the most serious attack against folks’ right to speak isn’t the prospect of an hour or a night in a jail. It’s the prospect of being expelled from your school; of being evicted; of being ostracized at work or losing your job. All of which have happened to scores of students, professors, and other professionals around the country. Capitalism uses threat of homelessness to compel people to do jobs they think are meaningless. (And there’s a good chance they are.) Turns out, our culture also uses threat of homelessness to curtail the content of messages that powerful folks don’t want spread.

Weren’t we all taught that, when this was done to professors in previous generations, it was the beginning of the end? A harbinger of horrific times to come?

As many of you know, I’m one-seventh of the elected selectboard in Hartford. To those who might think people who hold elected office wield a magic scepter: I stand on the same soapbox each of you do. (I don’t imagine it’s taller than about ten inches or so.) I don’t purport to represent the board or the town, nor will I ever. Unless I’m part of a quorum at a publicly-warned meeting, I’m just some dude. That was kind of the founding idea of our country, was it not? When Bernie Sanders speaks, unless he’s speaking as a part of an official meeting, he, also, is “just some dude.” He doesn’t speak for the government, nor could he.

Similarly, I don’t understand why some folks feel insulted when a neighbor writes something they may have already heard before. Our whole lives are a series of hearing things we’ve heard before. By telling you something, a fellow is not saying they think you don’t know it. Just that, on the off-chance you haven’t heard, now you have. For 99.9% of the things we hear and already know, we give grace; we assume it came from good faith. Is the difference this time the content? If so, why?

The office I hold is not a Political one, with a big “P,” in the sense of party-affiliated. But one key thing I’ve learned is that everything is political, with a little “p.” All choices we make have causes and all have effects. Those causes & effects can be from (or for) the most powerful among us, supporting the status quo; or they can be from/for the rest of us, working toward more equality, freedom, and human flourishing than we currently have. So if everything is political, then telling someone “don’t be political” is like telling them to not breathe air; it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s a good indication that the content of what they’re expressing disagrees with you.

Here’s my content: starting Thursday, snipers were stationed on the rooftops of American college buildings, with weapons pointed toward student protesters ostensibly protected by the first amendment. Snipers were spotted above protests at Ohio State University where, as a high school student, I took classes; attended an engineering summer camp; and interned in a lab. Snipers have been atop buildings around protests at Indiana University for three straight days. I said I wouldn’t post at length unless it was vitally important. Well, this message feels vitally important. The Upper Valley can not, and will not, recreate the scenes at Kent State and Jackson State.

Our consent for this is being manufactured by major media. On Friday, the New York Times featured four articles about college protests at the top of its homepage. All four hemmed and hawed about antisemitism. Tellingly, those who accuse the protests of being antisemitic will never define “antisemitism,” even when asked. (Pay attention to this if Dartmouth ever makes the accusation.) None of these four articles state the underlying purpose of the protests: to voice opposition to an ongoing genocide. Like so many other media these days, the New York Times has failed journalism 101. I know; I’ve taught it. I don’t wonder why the youngest generation has abandoned legacy news.

Did you know that the municipal police of most towns with colleges in them make a pact with their college to stay off the campus, in almost all situations, unless the administration requests them? This feels important to remember: municipal police involvement is the call of University administrators. And for campus police, administrators have full direction of what they suppress and the means they use. So it’s all on the administrators. Perhaps all on the college president.

Make no mistake: many students who live in Hartford will continue to protest on the Dartmouth green. Many faculty who live here will continue to support and protect them. Can they count on the rest of us? Can they count on us to show up, in effect saying “you young humans are too important to us to allow the shenanigans we’ve seen elsewhere”? If so, sign up for alerts and join me Wednesday for the most dorky dancing.

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Dartmouth and Palestine: Part II – the best of this week’s internet, and sneaker-net

I had mentioned why it’s clear the youngest generation has abandoned legacy media. (Read: they’re more wise than we were about how to spot propaganda.) I do wonder how Joe Biden expects to win an election after signing a bill that may ban the source for their news, TikTok. Did you know that TikTok isn’t majority-owned by China? According to documents filed with DC courts, reports to investors, and reports to the Chinese government, all verified by Poynter, 60% of TikTok is owned by institutional investors around the world, such as Blackrock and General Atlantic—shares of which you probably own if you have an IRA. 20% is owned by its founders, and the last 20% is owned by its own employees, 7,000 of which are American.

On Twitter recently I’ve enjoyed following the current chair of the journalism school at Northwestern University, a “J-school” where I’ve given lectures and workshops. His handle is @thrasherxy. He’s been taking shifts with other faculty to physically protect students camped on the lawn at Northwestern. On Friday he wrote this post: “No, I am not tenured. How will I account for yesterday and today and tomorrow? Will our board forgive me when I go up (for tenure) and let me stick around? Doesn’t matter. This is the job: to speak about important matters. And protecting our students is the only thing that matters right now.”

I think about this when I say things publicly that I suspect will prompt some folks to yell at me. “This is the job: to speak about important matters.” It doesn’t matter whether I get to stick around after my current term. Too many folks with power make the fallacy that they must “live to fight another day.” I would say that’s helpful, sure, but if as a public servant, it causes you to censor yourself… then in my humble opinion you’re doing “public servant” wrong.

If the role of someone in power is to be thoughtful, make good decisions, and have meaningful conversations, then I’ll try to do those. But I was once a journalist, and the role of a journalist is—in large part—to put what’s happening in context for others. Twitter user @_alialkhatib put things in context with a thread this week, which I’ll copy here as one paragraph:

“A philosophy chair getting arrested, an Econ prof getting her head smashed against concrete, a street medic being held down and tased, snipers setting up vantage points to shoot at Ohio state students—all because of nationwide protests against a genocide? You SHOULD be radicalized. I haven’t even mentioned the mass arrests, the administrat(ors’) incendiary lies, the totally belligerent behavior of university presidents and other political officials, or THE HUNDREDS OF BODIES FOUND IN MASS GRAVES WHERE DOZENS OF PEOPLE WERE CONFIRMED TO HAVE BEEN BURIED ALIVE. The appropriate reaction to what we’ve been witnessing over the past 6 months, let alone decades, is not measured objectivity; it’s trauma. You should be fucked up by what we see happening. That is the correct response. Look what they have done and have insisted we should be okay with it.”

All the stuff I’ve been ranting about with my last six columns has been connected. That’s when things start to make sense: when you realize it’s all connected. The connectedness comes across hard in this now-famous speech by Mike Prysner from the White House lawn in 2010. Every time I watch it, I get chills from my neck to the soles of my shoes. Prysner is a veteran of the invasion of Iraq. His message is as relevant today as it was when he gave it:

I’ll conclude by sharing another great thing I heard this week. It was written by a member of Upper Valley Democratic Socialists of America, and given in a speech to the crowd supporting Palestine on the Dartmouth green this week:

“Despite ongoing efforts by Dartmouth students, faculty, staff, and community members to demand divestment from Israeli military forces, the College continues to contribute millions of dollars to the genocide of the Palestinian people. For the past nine months, the same administration has sat across the bargaining table from graduate workers and insisted that they do not have the money to pay us a living wage for the research and teaching labor we perform. Dartmouth will gladly throw money at a settler colonial project, but they refuse to help graduate workers overcome barriers associated with the costs of childcare or immigration fees. This makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that the establishment of Dartmouth itself was a settler colonial project, and it’s shameful, but not surprising, that the administration chooses to remain on the wrong side of history to this day. Dartmouth has made it clear again and again that it prioritizes profit and power over human life and education, and this institution is not going to change no matter how many times we ask. But, and this becomes more and more true every day, Hanover is a union town, and we don’t have to ask anymore. Now it is up to us, the workers, to think of our unions as more than just organizations that win raises in a contract. It is through our unions that we can dismantle the systems of oppression on which Dartmouth was founded and in its place build an institution that we can feel proud to be a part of.

This movement is not isolated to our campus. In response to the recent atrocities committed by the Israeli state, workers in all sectors across the nation have been joining forces in solidarity with the Palestinian people. When these workers come together, they almost always come to the same conclusion: workers hold the power to disrupt the war machine, no other group is in a position to force this kind of radical change, but we are not yet organized enough to wield that power in a magnitude that matches the gravity of the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Developing a working class movement in the U.S. that is capable of truly challenging U.S. imperialism will require slow, steady commitment, and in some ways this project feels at odds with the urgency of the destruction that we have all been helplessly watching unfold. But what can we do from a position of powerlessness besides commit to building power? I encourage you to imagine a future where organized shipyard and railroad workers can block shipments of weapons to Israel. Imagine a future where wall-to-wall university unions can grind military research to a halt at a moment’s notice. Imagine a future where workers have the power to take matters into our own hands instead of hoping that our university presidents or state representatives will listen to our phone calls. Begging and pleading with politicians will never change the system they are beholden to, but workers keep this machine running, and only workers have the power to shut it down. 

In order to achieve the future we dream of, we need committed organizers to lead workers in a militant, politicized labor movement. Talk to your fellow workers about the role we play in contributing to an insitution that aids Isreal in commiting genocide. Talk to them about the power our labor holds, and begin to build the groundwork towards a liberated working class and towards a liberated Palestine.”

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Here’s the list of colleges where, as of 4-27-24, students have started encampments demanding divestment from companies supporting/profiting from occupation of, or attacks against, Palestine: Arizona, ASU, Auraria, Barnard, Berkelee Music, Berkeley, Brown, Cal Poly Humboldt, Columbia, Columbia Chicago, Cornell, CU Denver, CUNY, Delaware, Drexel, Duke, Emerson, Emory, Evergreen, FIT, FIU, Fordham, FSU, Gallaudet, GW, Harvard, Howard, Iowa, IU, Kansas, Kennesaw St, Loyola, Mary Washington, Miami, Michigan, Middlebury, MIT, MSU, New School, North Texas, Northeastern, Northwestern, Notre Dame, NYU, Oregon State, OSU, Pace, Penn, Pitt, Pomona, Portland St, Princeton, Puget Sound, Rice, Rochester, Roosevelt, Rutgers, SAIC, Smith, South Carolina, Stanford, Swarthmore, TAMU, Temple, Tufts, Tulane, U Washington, UCF, UCLA, UCONN, UCSB, UF, UIUC, UMD, UMN, UMW, UNC, UNC Charlotte, UNM, UT Austin, UT Dallas, UTSA, UVM, Vanderbilt, VCU, Virginia Polytechnic, Virginia Tech, Wash U, Yale. And more by the day.