I looked back over my calendar and checked a few websites a minute
ago to make sure I had the date right. It's true. Less than two
months have passed since President Bush went on national TV and
announced U.S. forces had commenced bombing Iraq. It seems like
a lot longer ago.
As I look out my Grace Hall office window now, what I can see
of the campus looks deserted. All of the students except the seniors
have gone home, and many of them are off at Cedar Point or somewhere
enjoying Senior Week ahead of commencement. I'm trying to remember
what it was like during the month or so when the war was going
on.
Unlike during the Vietnam War, when Father Hesburgh famously
gave disruptive student protestors 15 minutes to cut it out or
face expulsion, nothing happened this time that people are going
to be talking about three years from now, let alone 30. And maybe
that's for the best.
This was supposedly a hugely divisive issue - attacking a country
we think means us harm before it can get a chance to attack us.
Yet neither the preemptive war doctrine nor the war itself ever
generated visible swarms of opponents or proponents here. Plenty
happened on campus, but it never involved large numbers of people.
Which was a little disheartening to me personally.
I participated in and even helped organize and publicize candlelight
peace processions and other antiwar events as virtually the only
non-student member of the Notre Dame Peace Coalition, a Center
for Social Concerns offshoot that formed in the wake of September
11. Our most provocative deeds, in students' eyes anyway, were
chalking antiwar sentiments on campus sidewalks during football
weekends, like "A peace-loving country doesn't start wars," "Rule
of law, not war of convenience" and "Catch al-Qaeda, don't kill
Iraqis."
Our scheduled events, like the candlelight marches, drew plenty
of media attention, especially leading up to the war, but usually
not more than 70 or so actual participants. The exceptions were
a student forum in the fall and a postwar Preemptive Peace Rally
held on the Field House Mall in late April. Hundreds showed up
for the rally, but some appeared to have come just for the free
hot dogs and hamburgers -- many of which I, pulling relief on
the grill, managed to burn (the food, not the freeloaders).
The only significant gathering in support of Operation Iraqi
Freedom was a Pro-America Rally organized by College Republicans.
It was also held at the Field House Mall and drew an estimated
150 to 175 people. The event featured a talk by a conservative
talk-radio personality who said war protestors hated America.
He hadn't reckoned on a dozen or so Peace Coalition members being
present wearing bright yellow "Work for Peace" T-shirts and sincerely
clutching the free plastic American flags the Republicans had
handed out.
One afternoon while the war was in progress and apparently going
well I went for a walk around campus in search of war-related
signs in residences hall windows. I didn't find many. On the front
of Siegfried Hall an American flag and a "Peace with Iraq" banner
fluttered side by side. (I counted a total of five more flags
around campus.) A pair of large signs in the third-floor windows
of Howard Hall read "Pray for Peace" and "Draft the Bush Twins."
A sheet on the side of Alumni Hall facing the Law School declared,
"If we don't stand for something we'll fall for anything." And
then, less ambiguously: "Support our troops."
Student sentiment about the war, quiet though it was, divided
roughly along the same lines as in U.S. society as a whole. One
week after the war's beginning, a poll at the student website
NDToday.com asked, "Do you support a war with Iraq?" Of nearly
600 responses, 55 percent said yes, 45 percent no.
The one place where the war debate raged was on the Viewpoint
page of The Observer, but even there it was fueled partly
by what might jokingly be termed "outsider agitators." The paper
on March 25, about a week after the war's beginning, was a prime
example. A student columnist, a senior, described her trip back
to Europe over spring break; she'd studied in Innsbruck sophomore
year. She said Europeans were constantly asking her opinion of
President Bush and his war plans. She said she found herself struggling
with how to represent herself as an American when she didn't agree
with what her country was doing.
A junior wrote about running the lakes on campus and thinking
of his father, who had just been dispatched to Kuwait. A 1999
graduate described his being discharged from the miliary as a
conscientious objector. He said the United States needed to address
world poverty and not just make war on hostile regimes. Coincidentally,
below this letter, a fellow 1999 grad, an Air Force first lieutenant,
wrote from Saudi Arabia to criticize an earlier letter in The
Observer, written by a student opposed to the war (he'd apparently
read it online). Next to this, a junior took issue with the same
letter.
At a meeting of the magazine's Student Advisory Board held after
the war had begun, a fifth-year senior told me her professors
were "dumbstruck" by students' lack of activism either for or
against the war.
But the more I think about it, the situation made perfect sense.
Unlike their professors, nearly all of today's students were
born after 1980. The only wars they've lived through have been
brief, video-game-looking affairs that entailed little loss of
life (on the U.S. side anyway) and didn't pose any threat of ensnaring
them personally. No draft.
People with that kind of background and prospects aren't likely
to protest a war or demonstrate any deep personal interest in
it before it starts.
For the most part, they didn't.
