The people’s party

I inadvertently found myself participating in a very large political rally and protest march today.  Apparently the Flemish government has decided to cut the education budget, a decision that will compel many schools, including my own, to dismiss professors and possibly raise tuition. At first I was reluctant to join the demonstration, but then I thought about my own financial troubles that have been a direct result of the overwhelming cost of American higher education, and then I considered the generosity of Belgian society to allow me to study here at such tiny cost.  I felt morally obliged to participate (ironically, I had to skip class to do so, but hey, it was about Descartes, so it wasn’t much of a loss).

As we snaked our way through the streets of Leuven, essentially circling around my faculty as well as those of theology, pedagogy, and languages, people sung, danced, drank beer, and generally had a good time all the while chanting slogans from across the political spectrum, including Christian Democrats, Greens, and yes, the Workers’ Party.  The march eventually culminated in a street party in front of the provincial government offices, replete with Beastie Boys blasting on the speakers.  The entire event had the feeling of carnival and, quite literally, political theater.  I was also surprised to learn that the march wasn’t a preventative measure, either: the budget cuts had already been signed into law that morning.

I can already hear what you’re thinking: leave Schwartz alone in a foreign country for a few months and he’s already trying to overthrow their government. Among my friends and acquaintances around the world I’ve somehow gained the reputation of being a political and spiritual radical.  For example, a few months before I left for Belgium, I was shocked to hear a lifelong friend, someone who knows me almost as well as I know myself, recount how, when he heard about the capture of John Walker Lindh in 2001, he was surprised to discover that it was not me fighting my countrymen in the wastes of Afghanistan.

Evidently the American government may agree: back in 2007, during a trip to Montreal my debit card suddenly stopped working.  When I contacted my bank, they informed me that it was “probably” because I was signaled on the terrorist watch list.  There was of course no way of confirming this, but a friend who was familiar with the list explained how the system worked and why it was conceivable that I could have ended up on it through no fault of my own, such as my studies (Islamic history), my professorial associations (which include an old blind Palestinian man), my travels to Israel (during which I furloughed to the West Bank), or my very public dislike of the Bush Administration.

Regardless of my innocence, the thought that my society, much less my own friend, would consider me a potential terrorist was and remains not only frightening but dismaying — how can people misinterpret me so?  Me, the kid who wrote long theoretical undergraduate papers on developing the Grameen Bank into an alternative socioeconomic system to Capitalism and Communism?  Me, the kid who went to hear Gandhi’s grandson speak and went to live and work in an Arab-Jewish peace village?  Me, the Baha’i who, yes, might have considered becoming a Marxist had he been alive in the Sixties, but only if Marx believed in God and liberal democracy?  Me, who admires George Washington as a personal hero and esteems Thomas Jefferson as one of history’s greatest visionaries?  I’m a radical?

Well, if by “radical” you mean, “violently tear down the system today and tomorrow everything will be a wonderful happy utopia”, then that’s something I most certainly am not.  But if by “radical” you mean, “the system is crumbling, and crumble it should, but at a natural rate, whatever that may be, and ultimately in a transformative manner; in the meantime, the Revolution, such as it is, must be an organic and voluntary change of consciousness, from person to person and over the course of generations”, well, then yes, I’m a radical.  I am not John Walker Lindh, who had pretensions of being a Muslim Che Guevera; I’m me, who perhaps has pretensions of being a good Baha’i, but is striving to live (and die) a decent man.

But now I digress, because the march today reminded me eerily of my brief time as a Leftist in 2001-03.  Back then I was peripherally involved in the movement variously and contradictorily known as “anti-globalization” or “global social justice”, attending lectures, round-tables, and most of all, demonstrations.  I participated in my fair share of marches, most famously the one against the World Economic Forum in New York City in January 2002, in which I was one of the only sixty protesters to actually make it near the march’s target in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.  We laid down on the street to keep the police officers from cordoning us off too tightly, told a Fox News correspondent to have sexual relations with his microphone, and sardonically nicknamed ourselves “Dance Party Vietnam”.

I eventually quit the movement after the February 15, 2003 “preemptive” march against the American invasion of Iraq, which at the time seemed to me like a whopping failure, not only because we failed to stop the Bush Administration, who nonchalantly brushed us off, but because it was becoming clear to me by then that the “anti-globalization”/”global social justice” movement was an incoherent post-modern rent-a-mob, a ragtag alliance of ideologies all and sundry whose only point of agreement was dissatisfaction with the global capitalist status quo.  What bothered me most of all was what I perceived to be the distinct lack of seriousness: marchers would smoke pot, drink beer, joke around, hit on cute girls, etc., and in my discussions with them I discovered that very few had any real understanding of why they were protesting at all.

Now, seven years later, resting on my bike and observing my fellow protesters sipping beers and grooving to the Beastie Boys, I finally understood something that perhaps I was missing back during my leftist days: yes, the demonstrations are carnivalesque and yes, they are unproductive, at least in any materially measurable way, but that’s not the point, is it?  The point actually is for them to be fun and theater, because in the end, politics is about life, and life at its core may be serious but not drearily so.  No, life is joyously serious — spontaneous and exuberant and abundant.  And this is a truth I overlook all too often in my own endless struggles with the minutiae of modern existence.  I think perhaps I’ll be attending more protests in the future…