I’m not a terribly big guy.
I’m stupidly out of shape, and I’m overweight by far more than I’d like.
But I’m not a big guy. I’m not tall. I’m not muscular. Even twenty years ago when I was pretty well in shape and reasonably strong, I was a ropey little twig that weighed 135 pounds if I’d had an extra big breakfast.
But I had to pick rocks out of my grandfather’s fields.
My grandparents were dairy and crop farmers, you see. They lived just down the road from us. My uncle Jeff would just drive around them and waste field space, or hit them and break his machinery and have to spend thousands of dollars having someone come out to fix them.
At least half-intelligent farmers know the value of going out and picking the rocks out of the field, so that you can avoid those very problems.
So, every spring when I was old enough, I was expected to help. I hooked up an old tractor to an old flatbed wagon and headed out to the fields to go pick rocks.
I grew up along the edge of the Kettle Moraine, with rolling glacial hills everywhere. Good soil, but with a lot of rocks left behind by glacial deposits. A lot of the rocks were smaller, maybe up to a hundred pounds. Not, you know, light, but manageable for a twiggy teenager to dig out and wrench up three feet or so onto the old hay rack.
But some of these rocks were four or five hundred pounds.
I didn’t have a tractor with a loader. Grandpa didn’t want me taking the skidloader out there. It was just me and a shovel for the most part.
I could have tried to yank them out with the old Ford 7600 I was driving, but Grandpa Howard didn’t really have any chains or anything that I was allowed to use, and there wouldn’t really have been anything to hook onto anyway for the most part, plus I’d still be stuck with figuring out how to get them onto the wagon.
I wasn’t going to get them out of the ground by direct application of brute force. Even if I could, deadlifting a rock that weighed four to five times as much as I did at the time onto a flatbed hay wagon was only going to be a quick ticket to hernia surgery.
There’s been a lot in the news lately about pro-Palestinian protests growing in the United States. Students at Columbia, Yale, the University of Minnesota, and others, upset that the US is not doing enough to stop the war (if you could call it that) between Israel and Palestine, are staging increasingly large demonstrations at places like college campuses. These protestors want the schools to divest their endowments from any companies that are supplying the war effort, like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell.1 (What, you thought they just made household thermostats?)
They plan to occupy the public square until the schools cave to their demands.
The schools are cracking down on the protests. Probably because a few months ago the heads of a bunch of other schools were summarily hauled in front of Congress, shamed for not cracking down on the protests, and a few forced out of their positions.2 The students are getting arrested.
These demonstrations are not going to move the needle with these schools, and they sure aren’t going to move the needle with Congress.
When I was in my last year of law school, there was this guy in our school who was a huge Trump fanatic. I’ll call him Stormtrumper Bob. Big red MAGA baseball cap, wearing a surplus military backpack, with a neatly trimmed little Hitler-stache.
We had a Constitutional Law class together. He couldn’t help but antagonize the entire class and every human being around him. When we got to the abortion cases, he loudly complained about the Court striking down spousal notification laws because if it were his ex-wife (which made me wonder who was that desperate at some point in her life), then he would want notification so that he could, and I quote, “knock some sense into her.”3
Whenever it was something he thought should be a freedom, then sheesh and by golly, it was personally inscribed into the Biblistitution with a quill made of pure liberty fashioned from a bald eagle embodying the Free Holy Freedom Spirit of Freedom, written in ink made from the blood of fallen True Patriots™. When it came to a zoning ordinance that makes it impossible for strip clubs or adult bookstores to operate, it was obviously because those things are intrinsically morally wrong with no evidence or reasoning required and if they are allowed, there’s just going to be drugs and prostitution everywhere because gay people exist, QED.
While Stormtrumper Bob here might be a bit of an extreme example, he’s hardly alone. Tens of millions of people agree with him. Tens of millions more will hold their noses and agree to vote with him.
Maybe he gets outvoted. Maybe not.
But at the end of the day, our current dynamic isn’t going to change unless they can be made to change their way of thinking.
Like Stormtrumper Bob, like Congress, and like the college presidents and boards of trustees, you’re not going to change anything with these folks by protests. You’re not going to change them by yelling at them. You’re not going to change them by being condescending pricks to them (as personally satisfying and cathartic as that may be some days).
You’re not going to change them through intellectual debate, either. You can spend your days making careful, point-by-point refutation of their worldview and weaknesses, with sources and citations.
But you can’t reason with unreasonable people.
It’s going to be as effective as deadlifting quarter-ton rocks onto a flatbed hay wagon. Even if you manage one through nothing more than Herculean effort, you’re probably going to end up going to the hospital over it.
To move those rocks, I used my junior high basic physics about levers. Simple machines, which turn a small force on one end into a large force on the other.
I found a long piece of thick iron rod and a torch and hammered out essentially a 6’ crowbar I could use. Then I found an old 2x12 solid oak plank about 8 feet long. Using some smaller rocks as a fulcrum for a lever to get the rocks out of the ground, and then using the plank as an additional lever or inclined plane, I was able to come back to the farm after a weekend in the field having moved about a dozen quarter-ton rocks and a couple hundred smaller ones that had been in these fields for decades.
Made a hell of a cool decorative stone raised flowerbed with them when I took them off, too.
Using the right leverage, applied at the right time and in the right place, and with a little patience, I was able to move tiny mountains.
One of the things that I think these students are missing right now is how to apply the principles of nonviolent direct action.
Conflict studies define six conflict endpoints or outcomes:
Escalation, where the conflict increases;
Reduction, where the conflict recedes, but has not been resolved;
Management, where the default assumption is that conflict is ever present and inevitable, and the parties seek to make the conflict constructive instead of destructive, and the conflict stays stable and within definable norms;
Settlement, where the dispute is ended by focusing on behavioral changes, but does not resolve the underlying source of the conflict or the relationship between the parties;
Resolution, where the underlying cause of the conflict is addressed, but does not change the nature of the relationship between the parties; and
Transformation, which constructively changes the way that parties understand each other, and resolves not just the source of the conflict, but social dynamics that led to it in the first place.
Nonviolent direct action or nonviolent resistance seeks to transform conflicts by fundamentally changing the way the other party thinks and relates to you.
Most people learned about Mohandas Gandhi and the famous Salt March in their high school world history class. In general bones, what most people understand is that Gandhi organized a march of people who went to the sea and made salt, which the British didn’t like because reasons, and they were beaten but didn’t fight back and something something “through our pain, they will see their injustice”4 and eventually the British just gave up and went back to England.
The Salt March was in reality, of course, much more complex.
In Gandhi’s case, what he sought was the independence of India from the British, who had conquered, occupied, and colonized the place. But what Gandhi realized was that a revolution or armed conflict was going to be incredibly costly in terms of lives, that the British would feel justified in putting down armed rebellion and would become far more brutal, and that even if the Indians won and drove out the British, they would be left with a ruined land and a fractured people.
Instead, it was necessary to make the British want to leave, and to have a unified population with a replacement institution ready to step in and govern when they did.
Gandhi’s key insight was that nonviolent resistive action had to transform the conflict. Not just settle it, not just resolve it, but fundamentally transform the relationship between the British and the Indians, such that the British no longer wanted to rule and colonize India. This was a revolutionary concept at the time.
Political scientist Gene Sharp noted in The Politics of Nonviolent Action that political power does not derive from the goodwill of those in power to the governed. It is dependent on the obedience of the governed, which itself depends the governed people’s goodwill and their perception of the authority and resources of the institution governing them. If the people revoke their consent to their governance and become ungovernable, the institutions formed by the people lose their legitimacy, and are either forced to adapt and change to regain the consent of the governed, or are dissolved and replaced by a new institution that has such consent.
Gandhi’s Salt March strategically targeted that: it revoked the consent and obedience to a rule that was unjust: the British monopoly on the making of salt and their tax on it.
Gandhi’s early backers were actually incredulous at his choice of something as mundane as salt as something to attack.
See, despite the fact that salt was an item that people along the coast could make for free just by evaporating seawater, and is a necessity of daily life, the British imposed a state-run monopoly on making it, and charged an 8.2% tax on the sale of it for the British Raj. Making salt on your own was literally a criminal offense, so if you were poor and couldn’t afford the salt, you either went without, were further trapped in poverty paying for something you could have just made for free, or went to jail.
Gandhi’s initial backers wanted to target much more political means and ends, such as boycotting a land revenue tax.
But Gandhi chose salt for several very specific reasons.
First, the effects were not obvious to elites in power. Gandhi chose to target the salt tax laws because it was something that would fly under the radar and start getting people involved in the principles of nonviolent resistance without early disruption by the British.
He knew the viceroy didn’t take the threat of mass disobedience to this particularly law seriously (and would have taken threats to greater revenue sources such as the land revenue tax seriously), so there wouldn’t be immediate crackdowns just for organizing regarding it. Gandhi could spread the principles of nonviolent resistance, translate it into direct action which would prove its efficacy to people, and not get stopped until it was too late and the idea took hold that compliance by the people to their governance was optional.
Second, he chose it because it was an issue that affected the poorest Indians the most and particularly an issue that united Hindus and Muslims alike. Gandhi understood that he was going to need a unified coalition of Indians working together towards a common goal. Hindus and Muslims did not get along well. If they remained divided, the British could play factions against each other, or if the British left, Gandhi would be left with competing factions with no strong relationships to build a replacement institution for governance.
Gandhi was extremely deliberate in his timing and strategy. He wrote ahead to the viceroy and said “I can call this off if you’re willing to meet some demands,” which included things that he knew very well the British would never agree to (like property tax reductions, cutting military spending, and abolishing the salt tax). The viceroy didn’t even respond.
Gandhi sent organizers ahead to each village he planned to march through so people would turn out for speeches about the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience. At every stop, he had a great stump speech appealing to the injustice of the salt tax and laying out the principles of “satyagraha,” which translates to “insistence on truth,” and attracted a base of tens of thousands of general supporters for this cause right up front as he marched. The salt tax was easily communicated, and civil disobedience to it was easily replicated by anyone.
Once Gandhi got to the ocean and made a bit of salt, it sparked mass civil disobedience to it all over the country. Literally millions of people went “well, hell, if he can do it, so can I. They can’t jail all of us.” Then, once people saw one unjust tax as a situation worth ignoring, they started to realize that obedience to the rest of them was a choice as well.
By the time the British took actual notice, they were far too late to stop it. Crackdowns only made the whole thing worse because opposition to the salt tax was already broadly accepted.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was heavily influenced by Gandhi through theologian Howard Thurman, who taught and preached at Boston University. Thurman had met Gandhi on a trip to India in 1935, and was deeply moved by Gandhi’s struggle for Indian liberation. Thurman incorporated Gandhi’s work into his black liberation theology. Thurman mentored King while King doing his doctoral work in systematic theology at Boston University.
King later incorporated and furthered Gandhi’s work by laying out six core principles for nonviolent direct action in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.5 One of these is “nonviolence seeks to win friendships and understanding.”
This transforms a conflict: it fundamentally changes relationship between the parties from enemies to allies.
King worked with white people to try to fundamentally change their racist attitudes. He sought white allies, and sought dialogue with racist whites in authority. Instead of directly challenging their racism, he sought understanding of it. This did, in fact, win over some racist whites, who ultimately struggled to justify their white supremacist beliefs once they had to start truly examining them.
King used those relationships to seek constructive alternative solutions that were mutually agreeable with the whites in authority, so long as they also advanced his cause of black liberation and racial equity.6
None of what these students are doing right now accomplishes this kind of pursuit of changing the way of thinking of the people with decisionmaking authority.
They’ve started by targeting a complex, difficult to understand policy: endowment investments. Their messaging makes it sound like these institutions are just investing in war machinery companies giving things to Israel and if the colleges stop, then something something gazpacho and the war against Palestine will stop. It’s far more complex than that! Even if these students managed to get the divestments they want (which is broadly impossible and I’d need to write an entire lengthy additional article to explain why), it wouldn’t make any difference to their stated end goal.
Nor do the means directly affect their policy ends, either. The Salt March was specifically targeted at the salt tax.
It’s not easily and broadly replicated, either. How is a housewife in the suburbs of Austin or an auto factory worker in Detroit supposed to apply any of this? Are we all supposed to go into our 401k’s and pension plans and try to tinker with our index and mutual funds now?
These protestors have not allowed for any face-saving alternative solution offramps for the people with policymaking authority. If the administrators cave, they’re absolutely going to get hammered by donors and board members, and probably hauled in front of Congress again, and very likely lose Jewish and Israeli students who increasingly say protestors are harassing them and threatening them. There’s really little downside to waiting the protestors out until they become bored, and the only major mistake that the campuses could make is cracking down on the protestors and violently removing them (which does gain a great deal of sympathy! Watch this video of Professor Caroline Fohlin getting violently hauled to the ground and arrested by an officer for the crime of checking on a student who was also being violently arrested, and tell me that isn’t sympathetic.)
Nor have they pursued coalitions with people in a position to effect meaningful change, or people most affected by the issues. They have particularly failed to try to gain support with Jewish and/or Israeli students, donors, or leaders, or with administrators and board members.7 They’ve made efforts to gain support with Jewish student groups who agree with them, but little to no effort to engage with student groups who are on the other side of this issue.
If anything, they have gone out of their way to antagonize these other parties instead.
These groups like the “become ungovernable” part of civil disobedience, but they sure don’t like the rest of the principles and recommendations of nonviolent direct action!
This is not semantic. The only people with the ability to effect change in Israeli policy right now are its citizens and people who have their ear.
A lot of people underestimate Israel’s feeling of precarity right now. This is a nation quite literally surrounded on all sides (two or three deep in some cases!) by other nations that at best would not be sad to see Israel disappear or crumble as a nation-state, and at worst are actively trying to facilitate that destruction.8 Those neighboring countries outnumber Israel in population by at least an order of magnitude. Israel has stayed afloat through technological superiority and external allies, but more and more of those are starting to withdraw their support. The last major genocide of Jewish people is within living memory, and in the last 75 years that the country has been around, the nation has been through multiple wars with neighbors whose intent was very much to enact another one. The people of Israel believe, with good reason, that the existence of a Jewish nation-state is the only thing standing between them and another genocide, and that they are increasingly going to have to stand alone in preventing it.
The events of October 7 have only reinforced that. After an absolutely horrific, brutal terrorist attack, with armed men going door-to-door hauling people out of their homes and into the streets and executing them, raping women and killing children in front of their parents, now everyone is more worried about the terrorists?9 That’s what a lot of Israelis and Jewish people with Israeli heritage or family are feeling right now.
Any meaningful change to the conflict between Israel and Palestine must start with that understanding, and must offer constructive solutions that address that feeling. Nothing will meaningfully change until the people directly implicated in this conflict change, and when they are facing what to them sure looks like an existential threat, change is pretty hard! Any constructive solutions need to take into account the need for Israeli security.
Change is not going to happen by yelling at them. It’s certainly not going to happen by yelling at a bunch of college administrators.
Trying to do so is like moving a boulder by yelling at it.
Only by transforming the conflict, by building coalitions within the people who are in a position to make change, can they leverage this particular rock away.
We’ll set aside the impossibility and futility of what they’re asking for right now, as that’s a discussion for a different day.
This was probably more of a goal of simply discrediting higher education in general than any principled stand against antisemitism, but that’s also a discussion for a different day.
The irony that men like him and the domestic abuse they committed in these situations were precisely why these laws were struck down was never lost on the rest of our class, but sailed over his head at approximately the altitude of the International Space Station.
Which Gandhi himself certainly never said and comes from a biopic film about him from the 90’s that probably most of us were shown in class.
Dr. King did not immediately adopt nonviolence from Thurman and was skeptical about its efficacy, but was later persuaded by others such as Bayard Rustin that nonviolent civil disobedience was the only way to effect meaningful and lasting change.
For example, the attorney for the city bus company in Montgomery during negotiations over the bus boycott grew to respect King, and confided that the whites in charge were truly worried about the optics of letting the black civil rights leaders have a victory. King recognized that saving face for the white leaders was essential to securing the policy change they needed, and persuaded his movement members not to gloat or even declare victory as part of the means of securing it.
There are sympathetic professors and staff, certainly, but those with decisionmaking authority are not being brought on board here by these student groups.
A great many of these protestors are also calling for Israel to be ended as a nation-state!
Yes, yes, you in the back shouting “they’re not all terrorists! Most of them are innocent people!” A) Most is arguable here, because the de-facto government of Gaza is Hamas, which is a terrorist organization whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and a genocide of the Jews who live there, and the percentage of the population is an active participant or at least a sympathizer is… not small. And B) Those of you who lived through 9/11 may well remember we didn’t exactly have a lot of distinction between the people who actually attacked us (Saudis for the most part, by the way!) and the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US buried a heck of a lot more than 30,000 non-combatants under the sands and rocks outside Kabul, Kandahar, and Fallujah, and the people in the US at the time in the national grief over the attacks on the World Trade Center sure didn’t care and still to this day are probably not terribly bothered by it. Those of you who didn’t live through those times should probably understand that.