They don’t tell you that graduating from college can be a stressful experience. For the past three years, the University of Massachusetts has been my home, workplace and where I met many of my friends. As commencement approaches, I feel no sense of joy, excitement and feelings others have said one should feel as one experiences a life-altering event: the transformation from an undergraduate student to a graduated student. Such feelings, if present, are overridden by my sense of disruption.
I will return to California. I am unlikely to see my friends, my coworkers and others for years, if not decades. I will no longer see the brick-textured white walls of my dorm room, though I will not miss it. I will not miss the hot sleepless nights. I will not miss the random water-stained carpets. I will not miss the exposed pipes. I will not miss the performative security gates and ID checks at our dorms and the dining halls so often circumvented, whether by disinterest or because of the housing crisis and hunger.
My final semester has seen many students mobilize to demilitarize UMass in light of the United States government’s unyielding support for Israel’s war against the Palestinian peoples. The protests have energized and invigorated me and have raised my spirits, yet leave me with another set of unease; whether the demands of the protesters will be met, whether the administration will stall negotiations and wait out until summer break. I feel a moral imperative to see to it that weapons, planes and technologies that oppress the peoples of the third-world no longer be produced in our universities, workplaces and homes. Thus, I feel anxiety about graduating and leaving Massachusetts.
Only one week remains before I graduate. Most recently, as I wrote this article, the Administration called various policing agencies and dismantled the second encampment, arresting over 100 students, as well as holding students at the Mullins Center, echoing the Chilean dictator Pinochet who detained and tortured thousands at sports stadiums. Demilitarization thus seems to be unlikely to be achieved within the week. But as the infamous counter-revolutionary Lenin, who witnessed the revolution in the so-called Russian Empire, remarked, “There are decades where nothing happen, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
I will not be able to witness what the following decades will entail for UMass; whether Raytheon and other war-profiteers will be kicked off the campus, whether Reyes resigns, whether the calls for the abolition of the Board of Trustees be realized or whether the SGA will be relevant. But I know that whether demilitarization will occur tomorrow, next week or next month, that the “we” will be successful. After all, is the slogan of our university not the phrase, “Be Revolutionary?” My final words are for the returning students of UMass: join with the protesters. Do not study the language, science and history of the extractive colonizer in the halls built upon self-admittedly stolen indigenous land. It is only out in the fields, encampments and protests where you will learn of democracy and freedom. It is there where the revolution will proclaim “I was, I am, I will be.”
Benjamin Zhou was an Opinion columnist.
