Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

As I write this sentence, November 5th is one hour and seven minutes away. Soon it’ll be Guy Fawkes Day, which some young people do remember these days thanks to the comic book stylings of Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Perhaps in the U.K. it’s different, but I for one would not have known a thing about Guy Fawkes if it weren’t for the graphic novel V for Vendetta. As you read this, of course, that day will have passed, and I somehow doubt anyone celebrated the day in its true spirit, myself included. I mean, I feel pretty safe in guessing that I won’t wake up tomorrow to find out that someone blew up the Ontario Legislative Building.

I can tell you what will happen tomorrow at the Ontario Legislative Building. Not much.

However, at around four o’clock p.m., a slightly chubby politician in a tailored suit will look out the window and be surprised to notice that the lawn of Queen’s Park is lined with neat rows of young people holding shiny, expensive, mass-produced picket signs, chanting loosely modified camp songs almost loudly enough to be heard over the traffic. “Oh!” the politician will say. “Was that today? I thought that student thing was scheduled for next week!”  Don’t take my word for it.  Check out the flier I picked up at York University this afternoon:

Having studied the photograph on this flier for some time, I’m not yet sure if those three students are trying to catch snowflakes with their mouths, astonished by the sudden appearance of U.F.O.s in the sky, or exclaiming “We love you!” at a Nickelback concert.  One thing is for certain: the guy with the cool shades, backwards Nike baseball cap, and accessory headphones is definitely wearing a poppy.  How good of him!

Every year, the student associations at the campuses of York University and the University of Toronto launch a pricey advertising campaign (with a portion of the student tuition money allotted to them by the Universities) to mobilize a student demonstration at Queen’s Park in order to convince the Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty to lower post-secondary school tuition fees.  If that sounds like a ridiculous and self-contradictory paper trail, that’s because it is.  In 2003, McGuinty campaigned on the promise of implementing a freeze on tuition fees, a freeze he only maintained for two years.  Not the first time a politician has broken a campaign promise, of course, so it hardly came as a surprise.  Ever since, tuition fees have been climbing faster than the rate of inflation, students have been working more jobs at longer hours to pay for classes they’re unable to attend, and student benefits have dissolved one by one while the Universities invest in such wonders as flat screen televisions hanging from hallway ceilings around campus displaying such useful information as... the weather.  No doubt our government-subsidized post-secondary education system is cheaper than, say, the system in the U.S., but then there are a number of developed nations (e.g. France and Northern Europe) with free post-secondary education of superior quality to our own.  I concede that the goal of these protesters may have some merit.

I’m currently a fourth-year student at York University, hoping to graduate this year, and I distinctly remember the excitement in my first year surrounding the November 5^th student demonstration.  That year I collected signatures for a petition that one of my classes sent to McGuinty along with scathing letters about how we’d all lost faith in his leadership.  Ah, to be young-er and naive!  Our efforts went unheeded.

Flash forward to this year.  I walk onto campus this morning to find the pathways lined with plastic lawn-signs declaring November 5^th a “Day of Action” and calling for the reduction of tuition fees, which have only continued to climb since my first year.  A school bus picks up students from the University and ferries them downtown.  You can now send an email of support if you can’t attend.  The York University Senate even grants amnesty for those students wishing to attend the rally.  We may as well have the day marked down on the official University calendar as “Protest Day.”  It’s the day when we learn what it means to be a good citizen.  It reminds me of that episode of Arrested Development where Lindsay decides to protest the Iraq War, and the protesters are taken to the “free speech zone,” which is a cage in the desert.

In his lectures on parrhesia, the Ancient Greek word for the practice of “truth-telling”, Michel Foucault tells us that the truth-teller “says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves risk” (13).  It is for this reason that the Greeks knew “real parrhesia, parrhesia in its positive, critical sense, does not exist where democracy exists” (83).  If one is permitted to tell the truth, the truth loses its potency, its power to affect any sort of positive change.  It’s the dilemma of free speech.  Freedom isn’t freedom if some entity like the state “gives” it to you.  By virtue of it being given it puts the giver in a position of authority.  Freedom is permitted.  It makes freedom a thing, an object, a commodity even.  Nations begin to compete for whose subjects are more free.  They trade freedom.  Free trade is the freedom to trade freedoms freely.  Freedom is Coca-Cola, Nike, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, MacDonalds, Monsanto, and the rest.  We are free to live in the world as it has been structured for us.  We are free because we are told that we are free.  I am free to write this.  Thus what I write here loses all meaning.  I often wonder why I even bother.  It’s no wonder our generation is so notoriously cynically.  The very system we protest allows us to protest it, as long as that protest is within reasonable bounds, within our rights, and we are ungrateful if we stray beyond those rights, ungrateful to a system that allows us to live within it, that allows us to change its mechanisms, allows us to reprogram the software of its applications though the operating system remains inviolable.

It is for this reason that philosophers like Henry David Thoreau in the 19^th century differentiated between rights granted by the state and more fundamental rights that cannot be contained in any constitution or granted by any governmental of super-governmental body (e.g. the U.N.).  “All men recognize the right of revolution,” Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience “to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”  Certainly, ours is debatably not a tyrannical government, but inefficient, I would say yes, it is.  The world is heading in many dangerous directions and we’re doing little of anything to step on the brakes or to plan for a world different than the one we know.  We’ve built ourselves a home without doors or windows, a pleasant home, with luxuries and amenities, but at some point the home caught fire, and we are quite adept at ignoring this fire.  Now I sound like a mad preacher, heralding the end of days.  Don’t even get me started on genetically modified foods, monocultures, the loss of genetic diversity in food crops, the omnipresence of carcinogens in our human-made environments, and how bleak that future looks.  Let’s get back to the topic at hand.

So if we can’t be granted freedom, for Thoreau, we simply have to be free, which means we have to act freely.  The thing that these student protesters don’t seem to get is that they have no power, no leverage of any sort.  We whine a lot, but what do we do?  Well, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.  Year after year, our lovely protesters are intent on asking what their government and the university can do for them, mistakenly believing these bodies to be benevolent.  Like petulant children, we seem to think that if we bug Daddy enough he’ll give us what we want, a form of behaviour taught to us by advertisers to obtain certain commodities.  Perhaps we should instead ask what those in power want from us?  Even labour unions seem to have forgotten this: that the whole point of striking was to deny employers the labour they needed, to remind employers that the workers had power, and that this, not the monetary gains that resulted from striking, was the very point of striking.  To remind the system of its mortality.  That’s why the notion of a legal strike is so baffling and contradictory.  We are so blinded by what we “want” from the system that we seem to forget the system wants us to want what it can give us.

So what do Universities want from students?  Well, our money would be a good place to start.  What do they care if we protest as long as they have our money?  So don’t pay.  What would happen if we all withheld our tuition fees indefinitely?  No concessions.  This isn’t a bargaining table.  Either the system wholly changes or it crumbles.  If everyone did it, they’d been a jam.  They would have to change or expire.  Of course, this is a fantasy.  There will be many students of proper conservative upbringing, who have faith in the system, who will vehemently refuse not to pay, and most would be too frightened of the consequences if they did it and no one else did.  Moving a mass of people to act as one for a brief moment has always been the challenge of revolution.  Those like Thoreau say fuck everyone else, do what you think is right as an individual and take the consequences with pleasure.  There is, I’m sure, some sort of masochism underpinning Thoreau’s thought.  Thoreau was less concerned with changing systems than living morally as an individual and accepting your unjust punishment as an individual.  Perhaps he’s right in giving up on mass change.  I mean, imagine this scenario.  A few people are dissatisfied with the way government works, so they decide to violate the basic tenant of democracy.  They decide not to vote.  They decide to launch a campaign of their own.  The “don’t vote” campaign.  If the system is broken, don’t participate in it.  If enough people don’t, either the system changes or it collapses.  Actually, this is kind of what’s happening now with us youth voters.  I’m sure you’ve heard the moral outrage of older generations, that young people don’t even care enough to vote, a right that so many fought so hard for.  Well, there’s a reason that fewer and fewer people vote, especially those of younger generations.  Why would someone participate in a system that they’re disillusioned with?  How dare we call such people apathetic?  That’s something I’ve gotten up on my high horse of the apocalypse to proclaim on occasion, that my companions are ungrateful and apathetic.  I regret that now.  How dare we proclaim it a moral obligation to participate in a system we don’t think adequate?  Refusal to participate is refusal to legitimate.  It’s why Thoreau chose to protest slavery and the Mexican war by not paying his taxes, and he was glad to be arrested for it.   There’s no such thing as a perfect system, but systems have to change, and if a system refuses to change, fuck it.  All life has to change.  Life adapts to survive.  It adapts or it dies.