Good point, Tom
On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 tbhawaiiowan@... wrote:
> To the editor:
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> According to Bill Graves of Newhouse News Service in the 3.18.07 Star Bulletin, chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--first formed in the 1960s--have sprouted up again at some Oregon and Washington state colleges (along with growth in college Republican groups).
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> Apparently several former SDS members now in their 50s and 60s revived the SDS last spring and staged an official founding convention in Chicago last August. But Maurice Isserman, an SDS member at Reed College in Portland in the 60s, says he's encouraged that today's students--not the elders--will "reinvent" SDS for the 21st century. Isserman says he finds current SDS students to be "refreshingly nondoctrinaire" who are attracted to 60s-style activism, but don't think they are living in the 60s.
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> However, this article did not mention any evidence of "reinvention" in my opinion. Graves simply stated "the SDS members say they are committed to nonviolence but also to action, even if it requires civil disobedience." The only tangible examples cited are protesting the shipment of Stryker vehicles to Iraq (which subjected some new SDS members to tear gas and rubber bullets) and trying to get Coca Cola machines removed from campus due to Coke's mistreatment of workers in Columbia and the water system in India.
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> I think all of this is admirable, but not real evidence of reinvention of any kind. My favorite current example--which I read about within the last few years--of really "reinvented" activism is this: a couple of disaffected Wall St. wiz kids tried to address the Coca Cola problem by creating a put option hedge fund in which investors could make money by betting the price of Coke stock would decline, followed by an attempt to organize a global boycott of Coke products on the Internet to drive the stock price down. While I confess I currently do not know what--if any--impact this had or has, I think 21st Century activism will require this kind of reinvention to be more effective.
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