Peace, Love, and Intifada

There was a time when protest meant something. When it was driven by purpose and grounded in principle. When it summoned the courage to speak truth with clarity. When standing up came with risk — and people stood anyway.

In the summer of 1968, thousands descended on Chicago not to burn flags, but to beg their government to stop sending their friends home in caskets. Tom Hayden called for peace and nonviolence. Abbie Hoffman and his Yippies marched not because they despised America — but because they believed in it too much to stay silent. They didn’t want to tear the country down. They just wanted to keep their peers from dying in a jungle half a world away.

The chant wasn’t Free Vietnam — it was Hell no, we won’t go. The enemy wasn’t a foreign flag or a belief system. The enemy was the draft notice. The realization that a piece of paper from your government could decide your fate — that you could be drafted, deployed, and gone before you ever had a say in the system sending you.

When the Chicago Seven and the thousands who stood with them took to the streets, they didn’t hide. No keffiyehs. No Guy Fawkes masks. No middle fingers thrown at the American flag. They faced the tear gas. They took the batons. They stood their ground because they believed the country was still worth fighting for.

That was peace. That was love. That was rebellion with a purpose.

Today, something’s off. The crowds still gather. The signs still rise. The chants still thunder across the quads. But the rhythm isn’t protest — it’s performance. Intifada is not a call for unity. ‘From the river to the sea’ is not a vision of coexistence. ‘Stop the genocide’ isn’t a cry for peace — it’s a cudgel. The flags waving overhead are not symbols of freedom. They are symbols of fury. Of fracture. Of a plot line long since lost.

This isn’t protest anymore. It’s propaganda. On America’s most elite campuses, students aren’t just opposing a war. They’re cheering for terrorist groups. Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis. Groups that fire rockets at civilians, hide behind children, and glorify death.

The modern protester isn’t storming Washington to demand peace. They’re pitching tents on Ivy League lawns. They’re not drafting manifestos, they’re reposting rage. Most couldn’t tell the difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan, let alone why American boots were ever in Mogadishu or Bosnia. But they know how to chant. They know who to hate. And more than anything, they know how to be angry.

Today, less than a quarter of Gen Z say they’re proud to be American. That’s not rebellion. That’s erosion.

In 1968, roughly 90% of Americans that same age said they were proud to be part of this country — even as they protested it. They believed you could love a nation and still demand it do better.

We can debate how we got here — failing schools, failing leadership, failing algorithms. But the outcome is a generation adrift. Angry without aim. Desperate for purpose but allergic to responsibility. Pretending to fight a revolution they never had to bleed for.

The most recent cosplay on college campuses doesn’t resemble the peace-driven protests of Vietnam. It looks more like praising the arsonist who just burned down your village. A ceasefire shattered on October 7, when Hamas crossed into Israel and carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. Civilians were dragged from their homes. Concertgoers were gunned down at a music festival. And somehow, in the aftermath, it’s the perpetrators of those atrocities that the protesters now defend. That isn’t resistance. That’s moral collapse.

Foreign adversaries have always tried to infiltrate American campuses. They’ve sent spies. Funded propaganda. Tested the edges of influence. Never before have they succeeded so openly. Never have they found so many willing to trade critical thinking for slogans, or turn hate for injustice into hatred for America itself.

Questioning America is fair. It always has been. That is part of the deal. But defending regimes that beat women for showing their ankles, throw LGBTQ people from rooftops, stone teenagers for holding hands, and kill people for praying the wrong way — that is not protest. Calling it liberation is moral surrender. And it is being led on the very campuses that claim to champion academic freedom, enlightenment, and liberal values.

There was a time when a generation believed in something better. A future where the masters of war no longer ruled, where the table wasn’t tilted, and the chairs were filled by those with clarity, humility, and the courage to steer the ship forward — not for themselves, but for everyone.

Genocide? Look at Cambodia. Look at Laos. Look at Vietnam. Look at the hot zones America carpet-bombed into silence. That war was not clean. It was not proud. It was complicated. But even then, that generation understood the difference between protest and propaganda. They did not cheer for the Vietcong. They did not excuse atrocity with outrage. They marched because they believed America could be better, not because they thought its enemies were right. It was protest with a purpose. Not loyalty to the enemy. Not blindness to the facts. Not hatred disguised as virtue.

"This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity." — Robert F. Kennedy

America is not perfect. This country was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be bold. It was meant to test us, to push us, to force us to rise to the moment. That is the price of belief in a better tomorrow.

If you want to hold a flag with pride, let it be the one that stands for liberty. The one that carries the weight of freedom, democracy, and the dreams of those who crossed oceans just to see it wave.

Patriotism isn’t silence. Protest isn’t theater. It is the courage to face your reflection and still believe in redemption. This country has always been unfinished, imperfect, yet worth fighting for. And it is ours to continue. Not with slogans, but with substance. Not by tearing it down, but by lighting the way forward.

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