SDS in Graphic Splendor
Last fall a small group of students set up tents on the manicured lawn of Columbia University's campus in Manhattan. They staged a [hunger strike] to draw attention to the campus's 'culture of violence' while negotiating with the university over racist policies that they said were manifest in everything from the school's expansion into Harlem to President Lee Bollinger's disparaging remarks to Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
Even during a time in which our country is engaged in two wars many Americans oppose, this protest and others by [similar groups on NYC campuses] are a weak echo of the left-leaning student protests in the 1960s and 70s. In his latest book, [Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History](http://www.amazon.com/Students-Democratic-Society-Graphic-History/dp/0809095394/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201877978&sr=8-1), Harvey Pekar, the graphic novelist best known for his [American Splendor books](http://www.amazon.com/New-American-Splendor-Anthology-Cleveland/dp/0941423646/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201878231&sr=8-2), uses brief illustrated vignettes to chronicle the history of the protest organization that once permeated college campuses.
Originally conceived as a pro-worker, leftist – but staunchly anti-Communist – student faction of the League for a Democratic Society, the SDS went on to become a nation-wide network of protest groups trumpteting the causes of all things Left: labor unions, women's rights, civil rights and anti-war. Pekar at first gives a history of the organization as a whole and then moves to telling the personal stories of men and women involved in the movement.
The campus snapshots do not follow a strict timeline, and sometimes revisit characters without offering a reintroduction. The disorienting history lesson, though, conveys the confused nature of the protest movement itself.
The stories, told by former SDS members through Pekar are tinged with nostalgia and regret over a lost cause. Perhaps suffering from the benefit of hindsight, the profiled men and women frankly report the problems that drug use, faction fighting and disparate ideals played in the eventual break-up of their organization. But the former members also mix in their personal relationships -- one couple married as they held faculty offices under seige at Columbia University -- in to the history.
Our current national debate superficially mimics the anti-war debates centered around Vietnam. Both McNamara's fear of falling dominoes and the present administration's WMD-phobia eventually proved to be unwarranted causes for a protracted war.
Contrasted with these men who faced a real threat of war, today's protests seem anemic at best.
Still, we are less than five years into the war in Iraq. The original SDS was established 8 years after the first advisors were sent into Vietnam, and broke apart before the war's end. An afterword in Pekar's book, written by Bruce Rubenstein, touches on [SDS's reestablishment] two years ago by a high school student and a former SDS member. Maybe the recent interest in the protest movement -- there were three books published by former members last month -- indicates a change in our collective mood.