Friday, March 18, 2005
Demonstrating Spring
So ... had enough of winter yet? If the lake-effect snow band you live in is anything like mine, you’ve seen crocuses on the sunny southern side of houses that have been half-way out of the ground for weeks, their little green arms bent on their little green hips, irritated as all get out by the little snow hats that keep getting dumped on them. Enough already! We know we haven’t seen the last of the snow, but we finally feel we’re on the brink of something new. Maybe it’s just the marshmallow Peeps coursing through my system, but I swear I feel my sap rising, feel the desire to bust out all over – like June, in that old song, but I’m ready now. Look closely and you can see tree buds swelling, quietly thrumming with life’s giddy potential.
Because I work on a college campus, I’m reminded every year what it feels like to be a student in spring, to be both exhausted by months of study and brimming, thrumming with the potential of new ideas. Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate – an English major and campus activist – at a large Midwestern university, the spring thaw brought both deadlines for Shakespeare papers and appealing opportunities to demonstrate on the softly greening campus. My memories of sleepless nights in the library are cross-pollinated with those of moonlit sessions writing pamphlets and planning demonstrations about social justice issues that quickened my pulse as much as the gorgeous sonnets I memorized for class. I couldn’t resist acting on the ideas I was soaking up any more than the campus gingko trees could resist unfurling their fan-shaped leaves. Then, as now, I thought of myself not as a “protestor” – someone who speaks against things – but as a “demonstrator” who passionately advocates for turning ideas into action.
While my college days were Reagan years of scrubbed Izod-wearing undergraduates banking on business degrees, they were also years in which swelling student groups civilly disobeyed until universities across the nation divested their financial interest in South Africa’s Apartheid regime. We organized candlelit “Take Back the Night” marches and non-partisan get-out-the-vote campaigns. But mostly, inspired by our course work, we researched issues and sparked student debates under the blossoming campus trees. The promise and energy of education seemed headiest to me outside the classroom, where students – of their own passion and volition – demonstrated how the new ideas wicking through us like spring sap simply had to burst forth.
My own students, now, are commuters with complicated lives and less leisure for staying up late to design demonstration banners. And many of them find unappealing the stereotype of the “angry protestor.” I quite agree; anger is a dead end, Spring’s opposite. In the spirit of Women’s History Month, consider that the model of the modern demonstration comes from early twentieth-century suffragists who staged gorgeous parades with trailing silken banners and women on horseback in floaty costumes and stage makeup, meant to uplift and open minds, like spring flowers, to the radical idea that women should be full citizens.
This tradition continued on IU South Bend’s campus last week when a student group hosted a spirited drag show – talk about your hothouse beauties! – to raise thousands of dollars for AIDS Ministries. Tonight and tomorrow, IUSB students will also raise money for local women’s organizations in a gorgeous, funny, and enlightening production of The Vagina Monologues, demonstrating that politics and feather boas go together fabulously.
Each time I see students and citizens publicly demonstrating their ideas – through vivid posters or arm bands or winking candles held by gathered marchers – I can feel, regardless of the season, the thrumming energy and beauty of spring. I saw it in a demonstration this year at which piles of t-shirts were painted intricately, colorfully, with anti-violence messages, and then laced across our campus on clotheslines – making the personal political through vibrant strings of articulate laundry. I watched people cluster around the flapping displays, carefully straightening them after a tangling wind, and discussing the messages in pick-up debates with strangers that demonstrated the potential of ideas to inspire us to stretch and bloom.
What will you do with the rising energy of the season? How will you join the coming crocuses, sunny forsythia, and popping daffodils and lilacs – bursting out of your winter shell? Will you have a conversation with a stranger, maybe, about something that matters to you? How will you demonstrate what you’re made of?