The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Says undeclared major Valba Ghurraine, who sneaked into the Hall half an hour earlier, “It was the best party I’ve ever been to.”

  Says Carla DiAmbla, “I realized that the universe is an involuted cataract of energy, a boundless torrent of overlapping and interfering patterns of vibration. I saw that energy is both movement and stasis, vibration being impossible without both on and off, crest and trough, and that therefore ‘death’ is meaningless, since it is but one pole of the eternal pulse, and no more detrimental to life than blinking is to sight. I understood that ‘the universe’ is not, as I had imagined, everything outside me, but in fact both the observed and the observer, myself and not-self, inextricably. I was an eddy, a ripple on a wave on a swell, which could in no way buck the stream. As part and substance of the stuff of the universe, I contributed unfailingly and effortlessly to the dance of the universe. I sat back in myself, as it were, and rode my nervous system, my personality—that masterful orchestration of every influence I had ever known—like a schooner under full sail. All my motions, all my actions, however trifling or important, hackneyed or strange, were liquid and unhesitating, like the brushstrokes of a practiced artist. Existence was play, and I played exuberantly—not like a child, who forgets she is playing, but like an actor, in complete control of her instrument. It was fun while it lasted.”

  Says Troy Rosswind, “I felt excruciatingly thin-skinned. Everything happening was high tragedy. Sensation fell upon me like a suffocating cloud of dust.”

  Says Hifan Hwan, “It was a different world. People were holding eye contact, and smiling at strangers. Everyone was introduced to everyone else. The woman who’d sat next to you silently all semester suddenly greeted you like an old friend. Distinctions of class and age and clique evaporated. Every face was beaming with friendliness, goodwill, and laughter—laughter because we’d all discovered how easy it was. The answer had been there all along. We just had to open our eyes to it. Life could be like this always. We’d figured it out. We’d won.”

  By 5:15, the Ad Hoc Committee, convened across the commons in Room 410 of the Law Tower, had accepted six of the Nine Demands: hazing would be outlawed; a food bank would be established in the Student Union Building; unfilled courses would be opened to locals, free of charge; a committee would be appointed to investigate alleged clear-cutting by certain scholarship donors; to help prevent muggings, the Security and Safety Council would solicit student volunteers to escort pedestrians after dark; and Jaromir Ulgrave, dean of the Physics and Astronomy Department, promised to abide by whatever recommendation was given regarding Professor Reid by the Special Committee, still meeting in Room 204 of the Whitethorn Building. In exchange for all this, Suz Palombo had abandoned Demand Six, “No more animal testing,” agreeing that it was impracticable at a university so invested in the sciences.

  Only two items remained contentious. Jabbar Shah, dean of campus development, refused to discontinue or postpone the expansion of Lot M; and a few committee members, led by Albert Nhizhdin, were opposed to Demand Nine, “Amnesty for all protesters.”

  The stalemate was finally broken when Chief Pedersen entered the room, his face haggard and his yellow jacket smeared with blood. He spoke briefly to Vice-President Martin, who had been lurking at the back of the room, and who now made a gesture of renunciation.

  “I don’t know! You’ll have to ask the Committee. They’re in charge now.”

  Without meeting any gaze, but with head held high, Pedersen addressed the assembly. He said that the situation had deteriorated all afternoon, and was now nearly out of control. Though his men and women had fought the tide valiantly, they were frankly outnumbered and would soon be overwhelmed. He alluded to injuries, and everyone in the room stared at the blood on his jacket (which actually belonged to a student who had failed to hurdle a barrier). He said that he had been in communication with Chief of Police Les Dugul, who had two hundred officers trained and equipped and ready to deploy.

  “Oh God,” said Dean Dean, standing suddenly. “You’re talking about sending in the riot squad.” —“This is a crowd-dispersal unit,” said Pedersen. —“What is this equipment they’ll be using?” asked Shah. “Tear gas?” —“I was referring primarily to personal protection: helmets and shields and so forth that we simply do not have.” —“Will there be arrests?” asked Hofman Walchalm, one of the trustees. —“That would be at Chief Dugul’s discretion. My understanding is that arrests would only be made if necessary to expedite dispersal.” —“Oh God,” said Dean Dean, sitting suddenly.

  All of them, even those who had most strongly advocated punishment, were chastened by Chief Pedersen’s proud, battered solemnity, and appalled by the thought of riot police invading their campus.

  “What choice do we have?” asked Sacha Frean, dean of security and safety. “We either bring in Chief Dugul, or we surrender the Hall to the protesters.”

  “Put it to a vote,” suggested Martin. But no one wanted to vote. —“This should be your decision,” muttered someone.

  At last Suz Palombo stood. “We must reach an agreement. Now.”

  “Well, what do you offer?”

  “We could, perhaps, restrict the extent of amnesty . . .”

  “To whom?”

  “To the fourteen student members of the Occupation Committee—for example.”

  Nhizhdin made a seething sound and slumped in his chair. “In exchange for what?”

  Everyone looked at Shah. —“It’s impossible,” he said. “We have a very clear mandate from the board of trustees to increase the parking facilities at this institution by no less than 3.5 percent over the next two years to keep pace with enrollment.”

  Everyone looked at the trustees, Hofman Walchalm and Charity Meerquist, who looked at each other, and shrugged.

  Sirens were heard in the distance.

  Shah closed his eyes and placed his hands on the conference table. “We can—we will—reduce the area of expansion to eighty percent.” He opened his eyes. “Seventy-five percent! Three hectares. It cannot be less.”

  “Okay,” said Palombo, and hurried from the room.

  The members of the Ad Hoc Committee all stood and began talking at once, like a class of schoolchildren whose teacher has been called away. Said Chief Pedersen, unheard at the window, “That’s no police siren.”

  It was determined later that the fire started somewhere in the southeast corner of the basement, where the permanent records were stored. The crowd outside, who were in a better position to see the smoke begin to billow, cheered the arrival of the firetrucks with cries of “Yay, pigs!” Many of those inside, however, annoyed by the shrill alarm and smelling at first no smoke, decided that this was another ploy to oust them from the building. “Stand your ground!” shouted Wil Partlingover; and Langdon Bellhouse, at last brimming over with anger at the soulless, gimcrack modern world, stalked from room to room crying, “Protect the building! Let it burn!” while smashing fire annunciator panels and pull stations with the butt of his bullhorn. Dozens of people fled the building when the sprinklers turned on, but hundreds rushed to the windows and doors, taking up defensive positions against the onslaught of firefighters and security officers, who screamed at them in incredulous outrage to clear a path. “The place is on fire, you idiots! Move!”

  As the Occupation Committee broke up in chaos, President Radil ran to her office to retrieve the photo of her children, then descended the fire escape. Nolan Forntner trudged aimlessly through the brawling throng, numb with dismay. Tonja Salanitro removed her shirt and bra and waved them over her head. Allison Ziegenkorn tossed a newsperson’s camera out a window. Darren Kolst, a.k.a. “Julius Arbuston,” helped Elea Bukarica push a filing cabinet down a staircase. The cost of damages rose exponentially.

  Outside, a firefighter’s forehead was split open by a flying paperweight. Students, staff, and visitors alike were clubbed and pepper-sprayed. The crowd was
quickly polarized by the violence, and rushed into the fray to render justice or exact revenge. Fire Chief Fenton Glaslum gave the order to turn the hoses on the protesters. “By that point,” says firefighter Linda Thule, “you couldn’t tell protesters from bystanders; everyone was a protester.”

  President Radil met Chief Pedersen hurrying across the commons. After a brief colloquy, she told him to call in Chief Dugul’s crowd-dispersal unit.

  “It’s my decision,” she said. “I take full responsibility.”

  Then, feeling a strange pain in her chest, she sat down on the grass. She had eaten nothing all day.

  The fire was soon extinguished, but the firefighters, denied free access to the building, were unable to ascertain this by the time the police arrived at dusk.

  Says Chief Dugul, “We were moving into a building 23,000 square feet in size, filled with an unknown number of violent demonstrators, and possibly on fire. Naturally we were a little keyed up.” —Constable Lafcadio Stusdal says, “It was disgusting—a bunch of spoiled brats who’d never done a real day’s work in their lives behaving like they were the victims of some kind of horrible injustice.” —“The place looked like a fortress,” says Constable Kennett Labron. “There were crowds of people at every window. They were throwing rocks and bottles and heavy books at us before we could even get out of the vans.” —Sergeant Gladiola Kjesbu says, “For most of us, this was our first real action outside of field exercises. We had no idea what to expect. It was worse than any of us could have imagined. The demonstrators were behaving like crazed animals.”

  Many of the occupiers were equally intimidated by the sight of the police. Says Sanders Brand, “When I saw the cops, in all their armor and carrying rifles, get into formation at the bottom of the front steps, I knew that was it. We were doomed.” He left the building by another door.

  In fact, protesters outnumbered police by about five to one, but they did not realize it, scattered as they were throughout the building.

  Dugul’s force, inexorable behind shields and gas masks, entered Founders’ Hall at 6:17, pushing back the protesters as far as the atrium. Then, as much due to congestion as to defiance, the crowd retreated no farther.

  Chief Dugul, speaking through a bullhorn, ordered them to disperse or risk being fired upon. None knew that the rifles aimed at them were loaded with plastic bullets. A panic infected the crowd, composed half of fury, half of terror. Says Oreggio Ballenby, “I really thought I was about to die. I couldn’t breathe.”

  Constable Coary Harbitz could not wear his eyeglasses under his gas mask. Sweat stung his eyes. “All I could see was the back of the guy in front of me,” he says. “And him I couldn’t even hear over the screaming of the protesters, the thud of projectiles raining down on our heads.”

  Chanson Gearie threw a brick, but it fell short, walloping a fellow student in the head. This made her even angrier at the police. “In a way,” she says, “it was their fault.”

  Several voices pleaded for negotiations. “Haven’t you pigs ever heard of dialogue?”

  At 6:23, twelve rounds were fired into the crowd. Chief Dugul denies issuing any command, but does not condemn his officers for opening fire. None of the seven constables who discharged their weapons that day believes they were the first to do so, and all of them are certain that they aimed at the floor or over the protesters’ heads, in accordance with their training. Nevertheless, four students were injured, and one, taking a direct shot to the eye, was instantly killed.

  The crack of gunfire, the wail of screams, and the sight of blood sickened even the most ardent protesters. The crowd dispersed.

  Says Constable Harbitz, “They charged at us. We had no choice.”

  “Every generation has its monsters to slay,” says linguistics professor Bertrand Laing. “The problem with this generation is that, though they feel the itch to slay, they do not know what their monsters look like, or where they live, or how to find them. This frustration only makes them more violent and indiscriminate. They don’t know what to lash out at, so they lash out at whatever’s nearest. In the past, the enemy was much more manifest. You had a definite target.”

  Says Assistant Dean of Humanities Kimsun Poon, “The fact is that higher learning in this country and in this era has become altogether too wishy-washy. We educators today have all swallowed the liberal dogma that truth is merely a social construct—that which would be best for us to believe, as William James put it; our as-yet-irrefutable errors, as Nietzsche said. We are so afraid of being called elitist that we refuse to exalt one idea over another, or praise one book before another, with the result that everything combines into a porridge of mediocrity. I believe the takeover was nothing less than an instinctive revolt against this bland, mealy-mouthed relativism. The students, perhaps only half consciously, realize that what’s needed is a return to good old-fashioned elitism and exclusivism. They crave a firm hierarchy of values, such as we had in my youth. They crave authority.”

  Dean of Donations Jelke Beiersdorf believes that the extended adolescence is to blame. “In the past,” he says, “teenagers rebelled against their parents. Today, steeped in luxury and ease, children grow up more slowly. By the time they are ready to rebel, they are at university, where they find only proxy parents to attack.”

  Administrative assistant Esther Dentonne believes that such uprisings are bound to happen from time to time. “Every intelligent young person gets to a point in their life,” she says, “when they realize that everything is fundamentally a lie. Language is an arbitrary code; morals, like manners, are a convention; politics is show business; science is a tottering patchwork of makeshift hypotheses; the economy is a collective hallucination; even personal identity is a phantasm. Indeed, realizing that everything is a lie could be said to be the hallmark of adolescence. The hallmark of adulthood, on the other hand, is realizing the usefulness of lies—understanding that, though all our castles are built in the air, they are not therefore any the less majestic, or any less delightful to explore.”

  Philosophy professor Nifel Niesbundsun, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, says, “Young people are generally dissatisfied, but they ascribe their dissatisfaction to the state of things, and not, as they should, to the vanity and wretchedness of human life everywhere, which they are for the first time experiencing.”

  Says local resident Margit Strummel, “Kids will be kids.”

  Says Suz Palombo, “The takeover occurred for at least nine very good reasons.”

  Langdon Bellhouse says, “Just look around you.”

  Though the causes and significance of the takeover were long debated, public opinion was soon agreed that the death of undeclared major Scott Pollen, aged twenty, was a deplorable and avoidable tragedy. At his memorial service three days later, he was universally eulogized. Those who spoke remembered him with rough fondness as an ebullient partygoer and womanizer, an irrepressible clown, a free spirit who daily seized the day. His attendance records and grade point average verify the portrait of a young man who had come to university not to mellow in stuffy classrooms but to cultivate friendships and celebrate life. Of the dozens of mourners who celebrated his life that day, not one turned his death into propaganda or used the platform as a soapbox.

  “I hated him,” says Nigel Garff, his roommate. “For six months I hated him passionately. He was the worst roommate imaginable. He made noise at all hours; he left filth everywhere. I hated his clumsy card tricks, his dumb jokes, and his silly pranks—tossing lit cigarettes to his dog, or making himself faint by holding his breath, or sneaking up behind you and draping his penis over your shoulder just to get a rise out of you. Most of all I hated him for his many friends, and his constant parties, and the countless women he brought home—and blithely offered to share with me. I hated that everyone liked him. I hated the way he made life seem a lazy Sunday stroll. I hated him as we only hate the better self we’re too frightened or habit-bound
to become. I hated him; and I never told him how much I loved him.”

  Elea Bukarica, for one, is critical of the public outpouring of grief. “All this sentimental pity for some dead rich kid that most people never even knew is simply a distraction from the real tragedies of poverty and hunger, which kill untold thousands of people every day.”

  Chief of Security Radner Pedersen says, “It is not a tragedy when a criminal is injured while committing a crime. It is unfortunate, and it is to be regretted, but it is not a tragedy. When you break the law, you run a certain risk.”

  The last action of the Ad Hoc Committee was to appoint a disciplinary committee, dubbed the March Sixteenth Committee. After weeks of deliberation, this committee, feeling that popular sentiment was still on the side of the occupiers, decided not to suspend, expel, or otherwise punish any students. They did recommend that certain clauses of the campus constitution be rewritten to help clarify which demonstrations and rallies would be condoned, and which would be considered unlawful.

  The Security and Safety Council requested and received funds to hire thirty more security guards. These were deployed not at night to deter muggers, but in the day to discourage spontaneous assemblies.

  A tribunal was ostentatiously convened to determine whether the police who fired their rifles had been negligent; after months of investigations and hearings, they were quietly acquitted.

  Trifenia Radil resigned as president of the university, citing health concerns.