Why the Way We Protest Matters

We assembled for reunion in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College. We sat on hard wooden benches. The President of the College also sat, but he was up on the pulpit-turned-stage.

The ceremonial address was about to begin when students suddenly rose from all corners of the room. They raised banners and placards. A smaller group marched to the center aisle, up the steps to the stage. They placed themselves between the congregation and the sitting President, interlocking arms.

They chanted protest slogans. The President stood up and tried to address them without success. He went down the steps and addressed them again, with a microphone this time. He asked the protesters to allow others to speak, to no avail. The lead protester took out a small white bullhorn and a list from his vest pocket. It seemed to be a playlist of provocative statements. He led the group in rotating chants.

I don’t remember the slogans, only catchwords: “blood,” “trustees,” “divestment,” “murder,” “genocide.” But it was clear that the chants themselves were less important than the chain of bodies that cut the line of sight between the President and the Alumni; and less important than the wall of sound that interrupted the line of communication between us.

The protest was loud and irreverent. It was in a chapel, against authority. The cacophony silenced, not just a Presidential address, but all speech.

It was my 40-year reunion, and I’d come to my Alma Mater for the dedication of a library in memory of an admired professor. Stanley Rabinowitz had passed away earlier in the year. As I walked up the hill accompanied by another former professor, he quipped, “Have you noticed how we’re all turning into rooms?”

I smiled, “I hear that Stanley wanted his epitaph to read, ‘Here lies Professor Rabinowitz. Office hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please sign up in advance. I expect to be busy.’” We both laughed. And the laughter was a comfort and a protest against death. It was an irreverent gesture, that nevertheless paid tribute to the memory of our dear friend.

I’m 62 years old, and my classmates and I are facing our aging bodies and minds, some more urgently than others. One of us, once a handsome ideal of West Coast charm (and a friend), David Hollister, presented his first album titled “The Wolf is Always at the Door.”

The album is a testimony to his struggle with an overwhelming disease that is affecting all the muscles in his body. In an interview, David warned us, “there should be no expression of sympathy or prayers.” He joked, “a particularly gruesome fate awaits a person who terms any of this as being inspirational or brave.”

Despite his warnings, I was particularly moved by his cover of Neil Young’s lament, “Needle and the Damage Done.” The song is a melancholy protest against our vulnerability to a greater power. But it’s the grainy timbre of David’s wounded voice that gives this version a haunting quality.

The last verse compares a junkie to the setting sun. It’s an irreverent metaphor for our declining bodies. David sings about forces that are impossible to explain and difficult to control, powers that bend us down into an arc like the setting sun.

The town of Amherst is the birthplace and final resting place of the poet Emily Dickinson. Looking for solace and understanding, I visited her home, now a museum.

There, I learned about Carlo, a Newfie or a Mastiff that was the poet’s guard dog for sixteen years. Dickinson was a small woman and Carlo was a big dog. He was a gift from her strict and protective father, who lorded over her and worried about Dickinson’s every move.

In a poem about the effects of reverent gestures on biblical figures, Dickinson compared a tyrannical God to a Mastiff: “Flattered by Obeisance / Tyranny demurred … Moral: with a Mastiff / Manners may prevail.” She protested the tyranny of a God that demands the sacrifice of Isaac, and she countered this power with her ironic poetic style.

Dickinson’s poem is reverent and irreverent at the same time. She pays tribute to her guardian. But in the same breath, she inverts a tyrannical God into her loving dog.

Like political slogans and protest chants, the quip by Stanley, the voice of David, and the style of Dickinson irreverently protest what often seems like a tyrannical power over us. They all demystify the sacred quality that we give to that force.

But they are also different ways to protest.

The slogans are in a defensive mode. They build a wall of sound against what threatens us from the other side. Unfortunately, such walls never stand for very long, and they inevitably crack and finally crumble under the impossible pressures from all sides.

By contrast, the quips, songs, and poems are in the mode of humor, lament, and irony. They invite us to share in the difficult act of interpretation, which first requires listening to, and then conversation with that which is threatening to us.

As I leave my reunion, I think about its cumulative effect on me. Not only about the real salutary effects of remembering and reconnecting with old friends. But also, about the value of protest, and of listening to a new generation as it struggles (like I did and continue to do) with the powers that lord over us.

It’s important to pay attention to the form that this necessary encounter takes. The way we protest will either change our words into a silencing wall, or into difficult, but constructive conversations.