If it's easier for a man to be complacent, chances are he will be. Ironically, he'll shout and fight zealously to maintain that comfort. Most of all, he'll seek to silence those saying his complacency, his comfortable privilege, is unjust.
From the response to Wrenchgate two years ago through the ongoing radical efforts to educate the community on the occupation of Palestine and even - unbelievably, and repulsively - to the movement against the ubiquitous on-campus threat of sexual assault, those challenging oppression at Tufts have routinely been silenced. Not necessarily by policy or restriction of speech: rather, by the fact that culturally, the Tufts community seems to fetishize centrism.
A prime example (trigger warning: sexual assault): Tufts Confessions has, as of late, been wrought not only with voices dismissing the stories of rape survivors and their allies, but also with voices calling for everyone to, essentially, just shut up about the debate surrounding sexual assault. Read: Don't talk about what constitutes psychological torment, because it's annoying to read. "I miss the days when Tufts Confessions was a funny, innocent place and not a forum for useless arguments about what constitutes rape and whether women or men are more at fault in 'rape' cases," read one post.
Certainly, Tufts Confessions is a bad forum for discussion (and a bad forum for basically anything). But to engulf those speaking up for justice and compassion as well as those making apologies for violence not only perpetuates the culture that produces this violence, but also attacks those affected by that violence as somehow oppressing their oppressors simply by working to resist their own oppression. If that reads awkwardly, that's because it truly doesn't make sense.
I mentioned the action surrounding Palestine - a March 6 op-ed from Robert Persky made a similarly nonsensical assertion: "One should not advocate revolution if they do not have a plan for how things should be run after the revolution." Like the quote earlier, this comes, plainly, from a position of privilege. It rejects action because it lies distant from the immediacy of the cause, an immediacy experienced by the oppressed themselves and identified by their allies.
A subjugating force does not exist in a vacuum: As intertwined as are the tragedies of, for instance, homelessness and LGBTQ inequality, resisting those oppressive forces is not a simple matter of selecting a society in which they don't exist. These structural crises have been reinforced by centuries - millennia - of the self-perpetuating distance between the powerful and the not. The resistance to oppression, the action against a tyrannous climate - dismissing these because there seemingly isn't "a plan for how things should be run after" is presuming that twisting a broken system is the goal at all.
The goal is liberation. Each of the interconnected battles is waged alongside all others, and waging that battle involves acting as a force for liberation, a force which will serve its place inspiring equality in an ever-evolving society. Yes, a SCOTUS ruling that eliminates the blatantly illegal man-woman definition of marriage in American law would eliminate one of many oppressive forces against the queer identity in our country (despite upholding the inherently heterosexist and restricting institution of marriage itself). But it will not liberate the queer individual: That demands a resistance to the structures of inequality - which entirely forgo the State - that have restricted them.
In short, and perhaps in cliche: Change does not come through complacent moderation. It comes through wedding an awareness of oppression with an awareness of strength, and acting - marching, occupying, singing, shouting - to cripple the former with the latter. So much of the pain around us is invisible: if suddenly our eyes are opened to it, our response cannot be a shrug. It must be a fist slammed down.
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Walker Bristol is a junior majoring in religion and philosophy. He can be reached at Walker.Bristol@tufts.edu.
