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Well, I’ve heard of other countries where the students take a stand,
They’ve even helped to overthrow the leaders of the land.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re also learning how…
But when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.

–Phil Ochs, 1966

Virginia’s House of Delegates this week passed a bill that would block all undocumented immigrants from attending the state’s public colleges and universities. To my knowledge, only one state — South Carolina — currently imposes such a ban.

Virginia’s bill, House Bill 1465, was one of about a dozen bills recently passed by the Republican-controlled Virginia House that would impose new restrictions or penalties on undocumented immigrants.

HB 1465 passed by a vote of 74-25 in the House of Delegates, which has a 59-39 Republican majority. It now goes to the Virginia state Senate, which is controlled by Democrats by a slim 22-18 margin.

Professors at the University of Puerto Rico have called a 24-hour strike in support of student activists who have been subjected to harsh discipline by university officials and police.

Students at UPR have been engaging in actions for a year in opposition to tuition hikes, and the university has moved in recent months to squelch the protests. This week a judge lifted a ban on demonstrations on campus and re-instated a suspended student leader, but new clashes with police followed. Yesterday police “indiscriminately” beat activists with batons in an incident that ended in 21 student arrests.

More info and photos at the Occupy CA blog.

Update | In a strongly-worded editorial, the Puerto Rico Daily Sun is calling on Puerto Rico’s governor to end the police occupation of the UPR campus. Key quote:

As reported by the DREAMActivist blog this morning, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is looking to take another whack at the DREAM Act.

Hutchison voted against the DREAM Act — which would have given some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children or young teens a path to citizenship through college study or military service — in the lame duck session. At the time, however, she indicated that she might be able to support it if it was limited to “the intended group of children who grew up in the U.S. and attended primary and secondary schools here.”

That was then. Now she’s taking a different approach.

It is, Hutchison says, “a clear-cut issue that we should not deport young people who have been educated in our schools, who many times have a college education, who we encourage to go to college.” But that “we should not deport” has a catch. She doesn’t want to deport them, but she doesn’t want to give them access to citizenship either.

Instead, she wants to allow people who were brought to the United States as children — in some cases as infants or toddlers — to work toward permanent residency, but no more. Under her proposal, someone who had lived their entire life in the US, someone who knew no other home, would have no path toward becoming an American citizen.

Because that, apparently, would be “amnesty.”

I’ve been thinking about the idea of “apathy” a lot recently, and the more I do the more I doubt its usefulness.

A lot of what’s taken for apathy is actually, I think, despair. It’s a nagging, grinding, chronic despair that leads a person to think that what’s wrong will always be wrong and that they can’t play any part in changing it. It’s not apathy, because apathy would mean that they didn’t care. They do care, often, but they’re resigned to things the way they are because they think they’re powerless.

This is something I talk a lot about with students when they bring up the question of campus apathy. I ask them whether the problem is that other students don’t give a damn about the barriers they’re facing, or whether they just assume those barriers are insurmountable. My hunch is that it’s usually mostly the second, even when it looks and sounds like the first.

And it turns out that this is good news. Because if the problem in your community is apathy, you have to convince the people you’re working with to care. If the problem is perceived powerlessness, then your task is very different.

Convincing people that they have power is hard, of course, but it’s easier than browbeating them into giving a damn. And it turns out that the best way to do it is to go out and start making change — which means that the work of activism and the work of movement-building wind up being the same work.

Another important element to this is that many students who get dismissed as apathetic are really just busy. Busy with schoolwork, busy with jobs, busy with their families and friends. Or busy with projects that aren’t your project.

Not everyone has the time or energy to be an activist, and that’s okay. Activists do their work in part so that non-activists can live their lives without having to be activists themselves.