Unsettling the Seated

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Student advocacy is a marvelous thing. Some of the most formative moments in American history have come from student protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations. These displays of passionate idealism are often inspiring, especially when their sights are pragmatically set on local or campus targets. The current Wash U student sit-in against Peabody Energy and its CEO Gregory Boyce, however, is not only uninspiring, but is in fact based on unreasonable claims.

Firstly, the Wash U Students Against Peabody, along with their keyboarding-more-mightily-than-the-sword heroine Caroline Burney, enjoy citing the dislocation of Navajo and Hopi tribes as an example of Peabody’s unjust corporate policies. Although I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that these actions by Peabody were atrocious, they nonetheless happened in the 1960s, when the current CEO and Wash U Board member was about five years old. Furthermore, the mine that operated in the former tribe-lands has been decommissioned since January 2010.

Newsweek does list Peabody as the #9 most environmentally unfriendly company in the US. The faith in democracy, though, which the protesting students wish to propagate through their sit-in, would better be espoused by the doors of city hall across from the bigger arch in St. Louis, or better yet by the pillars of government in Washington D.C. A coal company has every right to lobby the government for initiatives that aid their business. Indeed, such an environmentally unfriendly company should have as much a right to do so as the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council.

And if the demands of these passionate student democrats, or the organizations with whom they sit, are not heard by the halls of representative government, then maybe they should encourage the voters from West Virginia, the state whose mountains were mourned by Wash U Students Against Peabody, to not vote for a Democratic senator who fires guns in campaign speeches to support coal mining as an imperative part of the state economy. Or maybe they should encourage Peabody’s new efforts, prompted by actual legislation, the EPA, and Washington University itself (aka sensible channels of democracy), to promote clean coal production. At the end of the day, the least these sitting students could do is to stand up and stop disrespecting Wash U’s image by the Admissions Office. Please go home. The tornadoes of democratic reality are about to rain on your seated parade.

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