#secstate

41 years ago today, President Richard Nixon announced a settlement to the war in Vietnam.

So Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with China's Vice Premier at my university today to talk about 100Strong and US-China exchange programs, which is pretty cool. But there was a pretty big protest going on outside the building because of his presence. Which is fine, obviously - staging a protest is a right that we're accustomed to and it's a good way to flex political expression. However, the protest happening today was against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Now, I totally get protesting the pipeline and the fracking that will go along with it. But you do realize that the Secretary of State is the one inside the building? It's not like the people behind the pipeline project are there. Secretary Kerry literally cannot do a single thing either for or against the project, and he has a lot of more important shit to worry about (China, Iran, etc).

Look, I'll say it again: protesting is great. It's an amazing tool for social change - think the March on Washington, the student Vietnam protests of the 70s. But sometimes protest culture can get out of hand, and unfortunately the only thing really hurt by this is the cause itself. Occupy Wall Street is a perfect example of this. Some of the original ideas behind the protest were great: highlighting corruption on Wall Street and income inequality is an engaging and sympathetic cause. But Occupy exploded and became more about the act of protesting, professing so many "objectives" and causes that it lost all meaning. This was only exacerbated by its dispersion throughout the US - as someone who lives in DC, I walked past the "Occupy K Street" version that was happening in Farragut Square. It was a joke. Just an ugly, sketchy, grimy set of dirty tents roped off in the middle of what is usually a lovely grassy area, full of crooked signs and people who stared at you as you walked past. What was the point of that?