THE DOORDASH REBELLION!

Ultimately, the campus demonstrations and turmoil that have marked this 2024 spring semester will subside. Then the question will be what difference did it make?  A Columbia University PhD student’s video went viral when she told the media that protesters were at risk of dying or becoming severely ill if authorities did not deliver food and water to them. DoorDash couldn’t deliver pizza to the beleaguered Columbia encampment!

I was once on their side of the barricades. So were many of the college presidents, deans, professors and other university administrators now facing down the students who’ve replaced them. It’s easy for me to put these kids down. They enjoy the essentially unearned privilege of attending elite US colleges and universities. … So many more can’t. Yet if there is a crucial lesson to be taken, it is that protests do indeed make a difference. The decision to bring the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State University campus in April, 1970 was directly related to the protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Four students were killed. The  impact on the conflict and on the Nixon administration was profound. I joined thousands of others marching against that war.

This time around, it is clear that the real threat — aside from DoorDash e-bikers on Broadway going the wrong way as usual — everything wrong with the Biden administration’s willingness to tolerate and support Israel’s war against civilians. It’s all about keeping Bibi out of the kip, and Biden’s major Jewish donors inside the fold. We now send war materiel with the left hand and hold it back with the right. As I write, Biden has just put a hold on war shipments. Johnson and Nixon just bombed away.

Back in the ‘50s, the unlucky kids, mostly poor and rural, either joined up or were drafted. They died in Vietnam, far away, out of sight — 58,000 in all. I finished undergraduate university in 1954, and was immediately called up. It was the tail end of the Korean war. Lucky me. That war took 36,000 dead and nobody remembers it. I do because the GI Bill put me through grad school. … There were few outright anti-government demonstrations then that I can recall. I knew a few C.O.s and cafeteria revolutionaries, and some other  wannabe lefties like me who hung in Washington Square Park. We didn’t yell. It was guitars, folk songs and the usual, girl-chasing.

So far, Biden can’t square the circle and he can’t do much to tame Bibi if he keeps on sending him arms and ammo. And what do these springtime demonstrations really mean? Do they matter? Well, yes. We will no longer have to fear Jill Stein or Robert Kennedy as the spoilers. A  very small number of students on a very small number of campuses — out of 15.8 million enrolled college students in the US — might toss the election to Trump. That, not the DoorDash delivery app, is the peril.

There is an up upside: it won’t matter that Biden’s too old.