Lessons of Past Protests

To the Gaza protesters: I was a useful idiot too as a student in 1970, eating tear gas at Fort Dix and in New Haven, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” with everybody else, never wondering where the money for the buses and signs came from. But then I made the mistake in the mid-’70s of reading the stories of the boat people who risked their lives (up to a third losing them, not great odds) to escape the regime I was de facto supporting. If you can, talk to Vietnamese of a certain age who remember it first hand. I urge you to find opinions about what Hamas really is from sources outside your usual ones. It might spare you from regrets similar to my own in retrospect.