I love the Hartford listserv. The town I grew up in didn’t have anything like this, and I wished it did. We had the internet; we just didn’t use it like this, like a real community. In 1997, in the fourth grade, I started a chat room on the early chat protocol, “mIRC.” My room was called “#Kids97”. Mostly I had fun programming the “bot” that patrolled the room. I could have it boot out anyone who said this word or that. I had lots of fun with my little power trip, loading in a long list of swear words. Perhaps “Gaza” is such a swear word here. I regret my 11-year-old policing of the internet. Don’t be like me.
Monday evening I attended a conference call, err, conference Zoom, with several Hartford residents and at least one person involved in the pro-Gaza, anti-genocide resolution recently passed by the Lebanon town council. Much of their discussion centered why Gaza is germane to Hartford. It’s not just the tax dollars we all send over in the form of weapons. (I hear Sharon’s selectboard recently featured a calculation of the amount their town’s residents send to arm Israel.) The Hartford connection is about our local Congressional delegation, as I mentioned earlier. It’s the environmental impact, which we know affects us. Scientists have estimated the flattening of Gaza has released more CO2 than 20 small nations do in a year. It behooves Hartford residents to know about police training: how it’s well-documented that many police-training operations have been designed and tested in Israel, on Palestinians. And it’s about a slippery slope. If we don’t agitate about this being done in our name, then what’s to say the next one that follows—or the one after that—doesn’t touch Hartford physically? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (MLK again.)
All this and more is why Hartford residents are organizing to present a ceasefire resolution to the Hartford selectboard, akin to the ones passed in at least thirteen other Vermont towns. A list of those towns is here:
Lots of folks have weighed in about what they feel is an acceptable form, or topic, of discussion. On the listserv and among the Selectboard, which again, I don’t represent here. I think THIS is the most germane thing to Hartford: our discussing with one another, civilly, about what constitutes acceptable speech and protest, and why. This is *it*. This is what my home town was lacking. So I don’t post here all the time, but when I do, I want it to count. Noam Chomsky famously said that any truly meaningful statement, if compressed into what can be featured in a 30-second sound byte, would sound like the ranting from someone *unwell.* Because it’s not enough time to explain your evidence or your thought process. So here I am, writing long. I’m not doing it to spite you!
President Biden’s remarks over the weekend about a few hundred student protesters were more pointed and irate than he’s ever been about the killing of more than 30,000 Gazans. Let’s put that in context. Yesterday, more than 300 bodies were discovered in mass graves in a second hospital complex in three weeks. The bodies of many people in scrubs, and many minors, were discovered with their hands and feet bound, indicating they were killed in that state. We’re supposed to believe college students trying to force divestment from this is more of a problem than the thing itself? Do we really believe that my saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is the primary problem here?
I had always thought that us educated folk drew the line, of what can be protested, somewhere well before “genocide.” Now I’m not so sure.
This week, someone shouted me down to say they disagree with my posting here. Totally fair! I was eager to hear their argument. (They keep a really nice yard and I respect their opinion on guns.) Their argument was that “breaking the rules,” for instance the rules of a listserv—which again, I maintain I only bend—is similar to what Donald Trump does; why Trump is bad news. They said it feels dangerous when someone thinks rules don’t apply to them. My thought is this: the severity of rule-breaking is context-specific. Courts usually acknowledge this. Protesters break rules to call attention to something. To make others think “why would they risk getting thrown in jail? Is this so important to them?” In other words, to educate. It’s pretty clear Donald Trump breaks rules for his own personal gain. Perhaps Biden, too, as he continues to ignore the Foreign Assistance Act.
If we can’t tell the difference between these two contexts, we might be lost indeed.
Epilogue: As of Monday, college students, including some from Hartford, at the following institutions have started encampments demanding divestment from Israel: Columbia, Barnard, NYU, The New School, MIT, Emerson, Tufts, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Washington University. At many of them, administrators have had students and/or professors arrested for their speech. (See a theme?) Dartmouth students, many of whom live in Hartford, held an emergency meeting Monday night to discuss whether they should start their own action. I don’t know the outcome of their meeting.
Brandon Smith 