The Truly Silent Majority

Who can make more noise – 100 voices, or a silent majority of 18,216 voices? Okay, well who deserves greater consideration – should it be the 18, 216 Washington State University students whose priorities last Wednesday included attending their classes, listening to their CD players, or maybe even playing video games with their friends, or should it be the miniscule mob of breast beaters and hand wringers who on Wednesday just past, protested the looming war with Iraq?
Roughly 0.55% of the Washington State University student body stomped around and proclaimed their dissent from United States foreign policy. They growled that students from hostile nations were being watched slightly more closely than the average student. They were upset that we would be soon be tossing a fascist dictator out of power. They couldn’t stand the fact that the arrogant United States would soon be imposing liberty upon one of the most tortured regions of the world.
Meanwhile, the other 99.45% of Wazzu’s student went about their business apparently unworried about the war or perhaps even supportive of United States’ objectives. So, who gets the notice? Why, it’s ½ of one percent who gets noticed.
As the front page of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News proclaimed, “Voices for Peace Grow Louder.” Maybe they were a little louder maybe, but were they any more consequential?
Similar protests around the country attracted similar apathy. At the University of North Carolina, 99.36% of the student body ignored the protests. All but 0.53% of Marquette University’s students disregarded the calls to raise a stink. Virginia Commonwealth University had 2 people show up for its demonstration. The other 99.99% of the student body went to class or drank beer. All of 30 students from Seattle Central Community College joined that campus’s anti-war die-in. That’s probably a lower than usual truancy rate.
But let’s not be narrow minded It could very well be that the pro-Saddam, pro-Islamo-fascism legions are growing in number. After all, I dropped in on a “peace vigil” in Moscow a little over a year ago and saw six people opposing the war in Afghanistan. When you can only attract six protestors to your rally, it does leave an awful lot of room for improvement.
The rally at WSU was preceded over the previous weekend by a blast e-mail from one of the faculty from the Comparative American Cultures Department. Dr. David Leonard announced that, “we intend to participate in a nationwide walkout in protest of the war.” He even went on to ask that the university cancel classes that day so that the protesters could grieve, much as the rest of us grieved after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
How about that? He compared disagreement with United States foreign policy with grieving for 3000 murder victims. Why not grieve for the 1.5 million people whom Saddam Hussein has killed?
According to the e-mail, the initiation of war would, “mean death or serious injury for hundreds of thousands of civilians. It would mean hunger, thirst, illness and homelessness for millions.” Actually, it would mean the opposite.
I’ll predict right now that fewer Iraqis will die from American munitions than perish in an average year at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Gestapo.
Somehow, I remember similar predictions about the war with Afghanistan. Since that war, hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned to their homes and the Afghan economy is flourishing.
In reality, demonstrations are only as loud as the news media wishes to make them. Does 0.55% of the WSU student body deserve front page, above the fold treatment? Don’t the other 18,216 deserve some consideration? Isn’t it a much bigger story that more than 99% of the student body either supports United States policy or cares so little that they won’t pull themselves away from a television or a textbook to complain about it?
It would seem that if the Moscow-Pullman Daily News sincerely wanted to feel the pulse of student opinion, they might have asked for comments from non-protestors or at least run the math, as I just did. After all don’t the 99.46% of New York University, the 99.71% of Rutgers University, or even the 98.67% of the University of California at Berkeley who joined WSU’s silent majority deserve consideration too?