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.

It’s become a commonplace to say that the sixties began on February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Ag and Tech sat down at the lunch counter of a Greensboro Woolworth’s in defiance of segregation.

But the February 1 sit-in wasn’t the first — students and other young activists had been protesting at lunch counters semi-regularly for years by then. What made Greensboro different is the way that it caught on, the way that it spread.

And it started to spread fifty-one years ago today.

There were lunch counter sit-ins in two new North Carolina cities on February 8. In Durham, more than a dozen black students from North Carolina College, joined by four white students from Duke, sat down in a Woolworth’s in that city. When the store closed at noon, they moved on to a Kress, which closed a few minutes later.

In Winston-Salem, the protest that day started small — really small. Carl Matthews, a recent graduate of Winston-Salem Teachers College, sat down on his own at the lunch counter of that city’s Kress store. When word of his action was reported on the radio, some two dozen other young blacks, mostly college and high school students, joined him.

By the end of the summer, one historian estimates, more than a hundred thousand young people had joined protests against lunch-counter discrimination across the United States. The first great social movement of the American sixties was underway.

The Irvine 11, a group of students accused of disrupting a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US at the University of California at Irvine a year ago, have been indicted on misdemeanor charges.

Prosecutors allege that each of the indicted — who include eight Irvine students and three graduates of UC Riverside — conspired to disrupt the event and then “deliberately and intentionally interrupted Ambassador Oren during his speech one at a time.” Each faces a single misdemeanor count of conspiracy to disturb a meeting as well as a misdemeanor count of the disturbance of a meeting — if convicted, they could face as much as six months in jail.

UC Irvine has already brought disciplinary action against the students involved, as well as suspending the campus Muslim Student Union and placing it on probation.

In an editorial published two days before the indictments came down, the Los Angeles Times argued that bringing charges would be “overkill, a punishment out of proportion to the offense”:

Is it really necessary to threaten the futures of students who engaged in a nonviolent protest that didn’t, ultimately, stop Oren from delivering his remarks? These students have been punished already, in an effort to make clear the difference between legitimate protest and their unacceptable actions. We hope they’ve learned a lesson. Now it’s time to move on.

The students will be arraigned on March 11. All plan to plead not guilty.

Update | Both the Dean of the UC Irvine law school and the ACLU of Southern California have spoken out against the indictments.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting this.

Back on December 7 of last year, erstwhile feminist Naomi Wolf wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post in which she claimed that sexual assault allegations lodged against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange were no more than accusations of “consensual sex” with two women who were “upset that he began dating [the] second woman while still being in a relationship with the first.”

This was a gross misrepresentation of what was known about the allegations at the time, as well as a misrepresentation of the sources on which Wolf herself relied in writing her piece. Ten days later, Wolf’s account was again confirmed to be false by a long story in The Guardian.

Wolf as much as admitted that her version of the story was “not sound” in a radio interview on January 7, but she didn’t go back and change the HuffPo piece to reflect that concession. On January 12 I put up a blogpost calling attention to Wolf’s failure to correct the piece, which I described as “a story which cast allegations of sexual assault in a negative, trivializing, and unfair light.” I wrote that I found that failure mind-boggling, given her own previous anti-rape activism.

Well, apparently Wolf got wind of my criticism (or received a nudge from someone else), because sometime in the last week or so she finally added a correction to the HuffPo piece.

Here it is:

The Guardian has, since I wrote this original post based on the Daily Mail, reported that the two women’s complaints to Swedish police centered on the alleged misuse of or failure to use condoms, which can be illegal in Sweden.

Yep. That’s it.

No acknowledgment that she misrepresented her own sources. No apology for ascribing false motives to the accusers. No link to the Guardian story.

And most crucially, no honest description of the allegations themselves.

According to the Guardian’s ccount, accuser A claims that Assange first pinned her down during sex to keep her from getting to her condoms, and then — after subsequently relenting and agreeing to wear one — deliberately tore it so that he could have unprotected sex with her without her knowledge. Accuser W claims that Assange penetrated her vaginally while she slept without using a condom after she had repeatedly told him that she would not have intercourse without protection.

In each of these cases, the women allege that Assange forced himself on them. He is accused of holding A down against her will to keep her from getting at a condom, and then later sabotaging that condom. He is accused of having sex with W while she was unconscious under circumstances in which she had previously explicitly denied him consent to do so. That’s what’s being claimed here. There’s no ambiguity about it.

And for me, that means that the worst thing about Wolf’s correction is its sophistry — because despite its many misrepresentations, there’s nothing in it that’s technically false. Assange is accused of “misuse” of a condom, in the course of deliberately and surreptitiously destroying it. He is accused of “failure to use” a condom, in the course of an act of non-consensual sexual intercourse with a sleeping woman. What he’s accused of is “illegal in Sweden,” but it would be under the rape laws of the United Kingdom and the United States, too. And while it’s true that the Guardian reported all this after Wolf wrote her original piece, it’s also true that she misrepresented what was publicly known at the time she wrote.

Wolf is, of course, aware of all this. She carefully constructed her “correction” in such a way as to make it technically factually accurate while leaving a false and harmful impression in the minds of her readers. If you stumble upon her piece today under the impression that no assault is alleged in this case — that it’s purely a matter of a bizarre quirk in the Swedish legal code that criminalizes consensual sex — you’ll emerge as misinformed as you were when you arrived.

That’s intentional. And it’s appalling.

Update | Comments on Wolf’s piece have apparently been not just closed, but taken offline. When I tried to view them just now, to confirm that I’d posted a link there to my original critique of the article, I wasn’t able to. If anyone can double-check this and make sure it’s not just me, I’d appreciate it.