Emotional strain of activism is tiring, draining, disheartening

With Israeli Independence and Memorial Day and Palestinian Awareness Week this week, many Oberlin students again found themselves at the intersection of emotions and intellect.

The religious and political debate about the Middle East that has been going on for centuries took place in Oberlin again this week.

Sometimes, the debate was civil and sometimes it was not. A large group of students congregated Wednesday afternoon and debated Middle East politics. Some voices were soft and some were loud. There was consensus and there were tears.

As I observed it, I didn't feel engaged. I felt tired. It's not that I don't think this issue isn't important or doesn't apply to me. It's that there's so much to it and Obies have so much stake in it.

On top of classes and social realms, these debates are overwhelming and they become more overwhelming for each student as time goes on.

I see activists becoming drained and sometimes jaded. I've seen people with big ideas retreat from them because fighting even the best of fights so often seems futile. Or maybe because they've already learned the hard lessons about activism.

And it's been hard not to become drained and jaded from my perspective as a reporter. All the painful issues have begun to seem the same after three years of watching them.

There have been many taxing moments during my time so far at Oberlin: The Arch Incident, the OPIRG debate, the SISC report, the end of need-blind admissions, nose-diving retention rates for Asian-American and black students, J-Board sentences for Bike Derby organizers, a possible shut-down of Keep Co-op for sanitary reasons, service workers union negations, changes in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the threat of Contract With America, internal debates in campus, Latino, Jewish and LGB organizations, Below the Belt, the future of TIMARA, the Holocaust revisionist ad in the Review, a flawed attempt at coalition-building, discussions of violence against women, the Kwame Ture speech, the Matt Holford suspension and fears of changes to College drug policy.

That list is incomplete, of course. And those topics have not had the same weight, though they've all been weighty at their own time.

Almost all those issues have followed a pattern featuring an outburst of emotion and then a forum or protest. And it seems those most heavily involved - students who become leaders if they weren't already - emerge tired. It's been rare that our activism has made an immediate, noticeable change.

I don't want to come down as anti-activist. At Oberlin - a place where activism is alive - activism I've seen isn't the same as I saw on "The Wonder Years" or in the Oberlin viewbook. The change is usually slower than we see in the four years or so we each spend here. We increase awareness through actions that we conceive as world-changing. And many of us have found that it's exhausting to repeatedly come up short of your goals.

For me, with an ear and an eye, so many of the issues that are important and painful and inspiring, it's frustrating for another reason. These cycles students go through seem the same and many students think they're all alone. The threat members of Third World Co-op felt last fall when they found posters for a Harkness party offensive seemed a lot like the threat many Jewish students felt after the Kwame Ture speech.

And part of that threat was a feeling of isolation. It's a feeling of isolation that we all share - though we don't know it..