Bienvenidos a Francia?

Imagine this: UGA SHUT DOWN BY PROTESTS! A noticeable decline in the quality of scrambled cheese eggs from Snelling's omelette line has been met with harsh student reaction. Add to this atrocity a 5-cent increase in fares for The Bus, Athens' legendary fleet of public transportation, and we have a full scale wave of public disobedience on our hands. To protest the sorry state of cheese eggs, they're burning Miss Vickie and J.Michael Floyd in effigy! To silence the buses, they've erected roadblocks at the entrances to campus. The University of Georgia has been brought to complete standstill! Classes have been cancelled; President Adams and Jer Bear have fled town; and armored tanks are rolling down Sanford Avenue.

It's hard to imagine this scenario playing out at my alma mater, or at any U.S. university. Well...except for perhaps that beacon of liberalism and Asia studies, Berkeley. Nevertheless, at least when it comes to domestic matters, we Americans prefer diplomacy to protests. We might bring up the bus fare increase at a student government meeting. Leadership-hungry Tate Society members would no doubt eagerly take up the cause. To address the food conditions, a friendly call to J. Michael Floyd might remedy the students' beef. (This memory is vague, but I remember somebody I was with once asking J. Michael either through email or in person to please increase the frequency of delicious Pesto Cheese Tortellini at The Snells.)

We protest only the big problems, the ones that can't be solved with a little politeness and collective bargaining. Americans take to the streets to show their discontent with the Iraq War, with uneasy race relations, and with the failure of entertainment studios to provide Hollywood writers with their rightful share of profits made on the DVD sales of major motion pictures and television series.

Things are different in Chile.

On what was supposed to be my first day of teaching, I arrived on Monday at the Universidad Austral only to be greeted with an impenetrable human shield. About 100 students had erected a banner that was blocking the university's main entrance, and these freedom fighters were guarding it...fiercely. Luckily, the shield wasn't so impenetrable, so I walked right through it. Once past the protesters, I realized that I had the university to myself. There was not a single other student or professor on campus. It was eerie. Around every corner, I expected a guerilla protester to ambush me and turn me over to the masses as a treacherous strike-breaker. But nothing happened. I just wandered around until I realized that I probably did not have a class to teach. I asked a security guard, the lone human being on campus, "Hay clases, hoy?" He chuckled. And as quietly as I entered the university, I left.

I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what was happening. Why had classes been so abruptly cancelled? Was there a coup in Santiago that I hadn't heard about? Was Chilean democracy crumbling before my very eyes? Hardly. After asking five people, all of whom gave me speedy and incoherent Chileo-Spanish responses, I finally found someone who would discuss with me slowly the goings on. It turns out the students were protesting the quality of food and accomodation at one of the university's dorms and an increase in the fares of micros (or small buses that most people use to commute). The bus fare increase: 120 to 150 pesos, i.e. 25 cents to 30 cents.

I've never cared for protesting. Maybe it's just apathy, or laziness, or worst of all my spoiled nature, but issues do not typically draw me on to the streets with plackards and airhorns. Actually, forget 'never cared for', I think I actually hate protesting. If I had been presiding over the university, the protests would have been quickly, if harshly, disbanded. I thought the Valdivian government was completely justified in its slight overreaction on the second day of the peaceful marches; they brought in armored tanks and riot police! And I've already been discussing with a higher ed administrator in-training the need for university protest management to be added to Vanderbilt's curriculum.

I just find it a wee-bit irresponsible. Chile is no impoverished nation, and considering that everything costs the same, or more, here as it does in the U.S., 5 cents just isn't that much money. Over the course of 100 school days, or a semester shall we say, accounting for commuting to and from school, students are only having to pay an additional $10 in transportation costs for the whole semester. The cost of my lunch yesterday. The real irony is that these students have missed out on two days of their education, and when you consider how expensive higher education can be in Chile, it becomes apparent that the monetary worth of those two days of lost instruction exceeds $10.

Some have explained it as a reaction to the Pinochet era. Back then protesting or any form of disobedience against the government might have landed you in jail, or you might have been tortured or killed. Is it simply that feeling of reactionary liberation that repeatedly draws the Chilean youths onto the streets? Two years ago, Robin and I witnessed a weeks-long strike of the entire public school population. Clearly this is a nation that loves taking to the streets with their plackards and airhorns.

I will not be joining them. I am content with having joined a protest only once in my life. Freshman year at UGA, April 15th: a brash and idealistic Erin Mordecai was staging a libertarian assault on the Olympic Road U.S. Postal Office. They had plackards, "Say no to taxes!" I couldn't resist.

It was exhillerating. But a guilty pleasure indeed.