Thousands of young college students in the streets — some tearing down street signs and tipping a news van –  were confronted by riot police and pepper spray before being dispersed late Wednesday evening. Another unruly mass of Occupy Wall Street protesters? No, it was Penn State students protesting the firing of a football coach.

After charges of sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky were filed last Saturday, Penn State’s Board of Trustees met Wednesday evening and announced the immediate firing of head football coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier for their complicit knowledge in the alleged sexual abuse. Following the announcement, thousands of students gathered in support of Paterno — endearingly known as JoePa — to protest the administration’s decision. At some point in the evening, the protest turned into a riot — which is sadly not the first at the so-called #1 party school.

Admittedly, the student protest-turned-riot does not speak for all of Penn State. As is often the case, the physical damage was inflicted by only a small number of people. Many students, alumni, faculty, and staff are, rather understandably, shocked and dealing with the news in a variety of ways — some extremely positive, like holding a “blue-out” at Saturday’s game to support victims of child abuse. Nevertheless, the events of Wednesday night show a culture rooted in violence, searching for meaning.

While the mainstream media has refreshingly got it right about not having pity for JoePa, it is worth noting that the frenzy-hungry news outlets haven’t pounced on the riot to condemn them for what they are: an absurd reflection of society’s obsession with sports as well as a general lack of critical thought and moral coherence among college students. The Christian Science Monitor published a critical news report and the coverage on ESPN has been fair in contextualizing the fallout from JoePa’s firings. But as institutions charged with having a public, moral character — including the media — there should be outright and explicit op-eds and university statements making this a teachable moment about justice, responsibility, and social action.

Penn State is charged with teaching young people and  “improv[ing] the well being and health of individuals and communities.” The scandal does little to model the kind of moral leadership such a mission demands. Should we really expect more of today’s college students who chose to protest — let alone riot — over the firing of the deified JoePa while neglecting the far graver moral issue of predatory sexual abuse when the institutions themselves are incapable of acting with moral character?

The Penn State affair and subsequent riot is like a mirror, revealing to us a more ugly state of affairs: violence is still a valid response to injustice (perceived or otherwise). The lack of public condemnation of the student protests is equally troubling, suggesting that the student response was in some way justified; it’s as if we tacitly understand or empathize with the students’ losing their beloved JoePa.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” penned F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Both the student riots and larger public response indicate that, in general, society lacks the ability and/or structure to deal with complicated situations in nonviolent and mature ways. The central foci of sports, especially college football, has displaced concern for victims’ needs and perpetuates a culture in loss of real identity. As Harsha Walia pointed out in an interview with Dave Zirin after the Vancouver hockey riot in June 2011:

There is a sense that people rioted over a ‘stupid apolitical hockey game.’ While I too wish people were motivated by social justice issues, the hockey game is not apolitical by any means. The riots were a fundamentalist defense of a type of nationalism, most evident in the beatings of Bruins fans in Vancouver last night. NHL hockey is not simply a game, it is representative of obedience to consumerism and is part of the state’s attempt to forge a false identity—despite vast differences and inequalities across race, class and gender, through the spectacle of sport.

What the Vancouver riot and the Penn State riot have in common is the loss of identity in society. As any Penn Stater or college football fan, for that matter, will tell you, JoePa was God. When he got sacked, there was a vacuum — a search for meaning –  at Penn State that needed to be filled. And contrary to all the press nonviolence has been getting of late, modern society is still dominated by the myth of redemptive violence. This myth, posited from imperial creation myths, suggests that violence is inevitable and the way of the world.

There are many factors that contribute to a riot, but at the core is a deep-seated, unconscious belief in both the social efficacy and ultimacy of violence. Add into the mix the history and circumstances unique to Penn State: JoePa as the greatest college football coach of all time, a socially-embedded culture of partying and heavy drinking, and a collective identity tied to Penn State football. Combine those things with the generalized postmodern angst that young people face without necessarily being given or taught the skills to cope with such ventures of self-reflexivity and systems of meaning-making and we can better understand what happened at Penn State.

The end has to start somewhere. That’s what brought A Ride Till the End’s Jacob George, Jerrad Hardin, and Russ Ritter to Bluestockings bookstore on New York’s Lower East Side yesterday, with their luggage-laden bikes in the back. For the next few weeks, they’ll be making their way down to Washington, D.C. on a Bikes Not Bombs Bicycle Tour, arriving in time for the planned occupation of Freedom Plaza that will mark the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, they’ll be a mobile speakers bureau and art collective, telling their stories in public and playing music, and raising money (in conjunction with Bikes Not Bombs up in Boston) to provide bikes for returning war vets who want to ride. At the heart of what they’re doing is a call for peace and, through it, a means of healing.

You can join them. I hope I will be able to. But in the meantime, you can listen to the whole Bluestockings event, including songs and stories from George’s recent return to Afghanistan with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, here:

Download [1:11:22, 32.7 MB]

It has been a year since I came back to Bogotá after two years living in Egypt, where I got to know some of the young people leading nonviolent protests and cultural activities. If I had been part of the Mubarak government, I couldn’t have planned it better; I left Cairo just five months before the revolution began. As I followed the news of what was happening there in February and March, I was here in Colombia, but a part of me was over there, hoping to see change, waiting to be part of it.

Cairo was a tough place to be—so hot, so brown, and hard for a woman, especially a woman who comes from green mountains, from a country with uncountable rivers, lagoons, and lakes. But what I missed the most while living there was my bike. I never saw a woman cycling, nor a businessman. Bread deliverers were on bikes, along with the very badly-paid workers risking their lives on a daily basis by crossing the 23-kilometer-long bridges that go through Giza and Zamalek to Heliopolis. Besides them, it was just a few foreigners living in wealthy neighborhoods dared to use a “steel horse” to go around on weekends.

I hope that’s changing. Still glued to the news from Egypt, I recently saw a picture of veiled women cycling there and thought proudly about one of the main goals of the recent struggle: elevating the position of women in public sphere, increasing their mobility, and challenging assumptions about women’s roles and limitations.

In Cairo I missed the feeling of freedom that bicycling gives, and the free circulation of body and mind between the traffic jams and hurried pedestrians. The first thing I did when I came back was repair my bike, which had been damaged by misuse, and ride around on it, rediscovering my city and exploring what had changed while I was gone.

Bogotá is now a very chaotic place, with traffic jams everywhere, all the time. Its public transportation system is degrading, and there is still no subway, even though there are now nine million of us. All that people seem to want here is a house and a car, repeating the consumerist mantras of consumption, well-being, and self-satisfaction. But there’s good news, too. As transportation in the city becomes ever more scandalous, a lot of collective initiatives are arrising to change people’s mentality towards mobility and public space.

During the last six months, I have been following the the groups that advocate for the use of bicycles instead of cars: Ciclopaseos de los Miércoles (Wednesday Rides), Mejor en Bici (Better by Bike), and La Redada (The Raid). What I found especially interesting is how—without always knowing the full political implications—their advocacy is inviting people to create nonviolent responses to the endemic violence of the city.

• Some of these initiatives emerged out of Critical Mass, the direct action movement founded in 1992 in San Francisco. The concept was appropriated by a group of artists, joined by their friends, and then by friends of friends. The biggest Critical Mass so far has been the alternative parade on Colombian Independence Day on July 20th, when around 120 people gathered to go biking alongside the traditional military parade. The slogan of the mobilization was “Ellos marchan con tanques, nosotros marchamos con bici” (“They march with tanks, we march with bikes”). All at once, they declared independence from the use of cars, the parade’s monopolization of street use, and the historical legitimization of military violence.
• The use of bikes brings equality. Traditionally in Bogotá, only the working class rode bicycles. Many have to ride long distances from south to north, with no bike paths or other protection, because they can’t afford transportation expenses. Since 1997, however, construction began on a 340-kilometer CicloRuta (BikeWay) all over the city. The CicloRuta connects with parks and avenues, and it goes from poor neighborhoods to affluent boulevards. Whenever one of the three groups I’ve followed calls for a massive ride, they try to gather participants who are diverse in age and socioeconomic class.
• The use of bikes instead of public transportation and cars is also becoming a way of changing how the city’s reality is perceived, transgressing the invisible barriers built across public space. Every Wednesday, the Ciclopaseos de los Miércoles gather around 150 people to ride through some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. (Last July 27th, they reached the astonishing number of 370 people for their fifth anniversary.) Bogotá can be a violent city, with widespread criminality, gangs (from petty to paramilitary), and robbery. Some neighborhoods in the south are historically stigmatized by the presence of forcibly-displaced people from the countryside, who live among homeless people in the streets and red-light districts. These rides often visit such neighborhoods—at night, no less—repudiating the fear and re-appropriating areas of the city usually thought to be dangerous and even inaccessible.

One of the activists talks about these rides as moving heterotopias, in the terms of French social theorist Michel Foucault: a mobile, non-hegemonic space. For cyclists in Bogotá today, a mode of transportation has become a way to resist and to raise awareness about the need for inclusion and social transformation.

The game was released in June 2010 just in time for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Since its inception, it has been hailed by critics, fans and players as a masterly attempt to create new discourses and open doors around the contentious issues of gender violence, racial stereotyping and fair team play.

Endorsed by Cameroonian football star Samuel Eto’o, Breakaway is the first narrative-driven interactive online game of its kind and is currently being distributed free around the world via the internet and youth organizations.

[...]

Breakaway is premised on the ideal of ‘fair play’, and the player is forced to make choices based on a host of situations before he or she is allowed to advance in the game.

[...]

Less than six months after its release, Breakaway is making monumental progress. The game’s designers have already recorded over a thousand registered users from 95 different countries.

The game can be played for free here, so check it out and spread the word.

But it took just one strike for Dan Moore and Sarah Szekeresh to get booted from the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Ohio, last Wednesday after unfurling a banner protesting SB1070, Arizona’s recent bill targeting immigration, over the center field wall during an Arizona Diamondbacks game against the Cincinnati Reds.

Moore and Szekeresh were then arrested for disorderly conduct and spent six hours in jail. The fourth-degree misdemeanor carries a penalty of up to $250 and 30 days in jail. The pair pled not guilty and will have a bench trial on October 4.

In an interview with Waging Nonviolence, Moore said that talking about his arrest misses the point. “Immigrant families get arrested every day for bogus reasons, and these criminal records cause significant damage to their lives,” he tells WNV. “All this talk about being arrested – when I can go home and continue my job and my life – just dramatizes the true catastrophe going on in immigrant communities around deportation. Families get ripped apart. It’s hard to pity myself.”

Szekeresh felt similarly, telling the Cincinnati Enquirer, “It’s not about me.”

The risk of arrest is a real concern for undocumented people. “It highlights the role that allies can play in the struggle for immigration reform,” said Moore. “Immigrants have owned much of it, but when it comes to tactics that would expose undocumented people to unnecessary risks and even deportation, allies must also step up. We must work to responsibly escalate the struggle.”

Protests have followed the Arizona Diamondbacks across the country. “We don’t have ambassadors between states,” explained Moore. “Baseball games are as close as we get, and these actions communicate to people in Arizona that anti-immigrant hate will not be welcome here. It won’t be normalized.” That message, disseminated by the AP, reappeared in local Arizona newspapers.

Moore and Szekeresh planned their action with the help of both immigrant communities and activists in other cities, including those promoting MoveTheGame.org, a website petitioning Major League Baseball to change the venue of the July 2011 All-Star Game, currently scheduled for Phoenix.

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Stephen Walt wrote about an interesting development in the tennis world that relates to nonviolence. In the men’s doubles championship finals at the U.S. Open today, the number one ranked Bryan brothers faced an unlikely duo: Rohan Bopanna of India and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan. As Walt notes:

Bopanna and Qureshi view their partnership as symbol of the possibility of improved relations between their two countries — among other things, they sometimes wear t-shirts reading “Stop War, Start Tennis” — and their success at this year’s tournament even got the two countries’ U.N. ambassadors to sit together at one of their recent matches.

While the Bryan brothers prevailed in an extremely close match just minutes ago, in Bopanna and Qureshi I’ve found a team that I will be rooting for in the future.

On the one hand this could be a great idea, incorporating what’s clearly become a new way for a group of people to completely dominate an event. On the other hand, there is evidence that this plastic noise trinket can cause hearing damage, which is not a good way for any activist to try and make a point. As always, we’ll let the French be our test market when it comes to protesting, since they love it so much.

As the World Cup began in South Africa on Friday, Palestinians from the town of Bil’in formed a “national football team” and marched, along with dozens of Israeli and international activists, to the separation wall.

Sporting Palestinian uniforms, the players erected a goal next to the wall and began playing. After kicking several soccer balls over the fence to land that was once owned by the village, Israeli soldiers responded as they have in the past, by fired tear gas at the participants. According to the Friends of Freedom and Justice – Bil’in:

They then came through the fence, and arrested 6 journalists, four of whom were soon released… The tear gas canisters fired also caused large fires on the dry ground around the olive trees. Soldiers fired more canisters, aiming for the groups of villagers attempting to put out the flames.

While Ahlul Bayt News Agency said that the nonviolent protesters “did nothing but kick footballs,” the video above clearly shows that several of the youth involved did unfortunately throw rocks as well.

• Protests against the Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla continued around the world over the weekend. Several thousand people gathered outside Downing Street in London on Saturday. Thousands of Moroccans marched in the kingdom’s capital of Rabat on Sunday. Hundreds marched to Capitol Hill in Ottawa. And hundreds more marched to the Israeli embassy in Dublin (see above). In other news, the U.S. rock band Pixies has canceled a concert in Tel Aviv and dockworkers in Sweden are enacting a week long boycott of Israeli goods.

• Hundreds gathered outside BP’s DC headquarters on Friday to call for a “Citizens Arrest” of CEO Tony Hayward on the charges of criminal negligence. Meanwhile, several dozen people converged on a BP service station in Pensacola on Sunday to mobilize support for a boycott and a minor league baseball team in Viera, FL is changing the name of “batting practice” or “BP” for short to “hitting rehearsal.”

• A group of New York City immigrant advocates calling on lawmakers to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act or “DREAM” joined high school and college students for a hunger strike in Washington Square Park on Friday. Some of the demonstrators had been fasting since Tuesday.

• About 100 people rallied on the California-Mexico border Thursday to protest the death of a migrant after a U.S. immigration officer shot him with a stun gun.

• Eight people were arrested after chaining themselves together outside the federal building in Santa Ana, CA on Thursday as part of a protest against Arizona’s recent immigration legislation. They were also calling on Santa Ana to declare itself a sanctuary city.

• Alabama fisherman, who’ve been idled by the massive ban on fishing in the oiled waters of the Gulf of Mexico, formed a blockade of the Mississippi Sound to protest BP’s hiring of more recreational boaters than commercial fishermen to aid in the cleanup.

• Around 400 workers from Chicago’s Hyatt Regency hotel staged a brief but pointed walkout last Wednesday to protest poor working conditions.

I’m also a bicyclist, raised to idolize the city’s fearless bike couriers. I’ve put my bike and my body in those streets, removing one more murderous car from the congestion and a few more pounds of CO2 from the air. In return, in the name of order and hurry, I’ve been pulled over by cops and hit from behind by an impatient taxi. Security means insecurity. Transporting myself sanely means risking my life.

At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.

[T]he Nuclear Summit security situation showed that mentality isn’t just silly—it actually causes danger, it actually introduces hazards. Again, heads of state obviously need some protection, like bodyguards; but it was just as obvious to anyone who tried to get within a mile of the Convention Center last month that security had spilled over into paranoia. To the point that military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.

Read the rest at 3quarksdaily.

Here is a interesting report by Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver Media Co-op that aired on Democracy Now! about the developing protests around the Winter Olympics which began in Vancouver today. To thwart positive coverage of the protests, Canada has stopped at least two American journalists from entering the country this week, including John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City and Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias.

Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. talk before a press conference in New York City in 1962.

Writing online for Sports Illustrated this week on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, columnist Dave Zirin reminds readers that Dr. King, while perhaps not the greatest athlete himself, nonetheless embraced sports as an effective and serious platform from which to promote civil rights.  “Dr. King,” Zirin writes, “was involved in three of history’s most critical collisions of sports and politics”—Jackie Robinson’s integration of modern baseball in 1947; Muhammad Ali’s struggle against the Vietnam War and the draft board in the late 1960s; and the protests promulgated by Harry Edwards and his Olympic Project for Human Rights at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics.

Dr. King, argues Zirin, embraced a broad view of sports, correctly seeing them as a powerful medium by which to convey his message.  Dr. King didn’t see “athletes” as a distinct subset of the population, that is, as mere performers who daily displayed wondrous feats of physical prowess for everyone to enjoy.  Rather, athletes were human beings who happened to be involved in sports.  In other words, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali drew their principal identities from their humanity, not from their idiosyncratic physical talent.  It is a concept that we frequently seem to forget.

Too often today, an athlete’s visibility determines how he will be treated and accepted in society.  It was widely speculated, for example, that ex-New York Giant Plaxico Burress received a harsh, two-year prison sentence for attempted weapons possession in the second degree, because New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to make an example of the Super Bowl XLII hero.  Gilbert Arenas, erstwhile All-Star guard for the N.B.A.’s Washington Wizards, is currently embroiled in his own gun-possession brouhaha and some expect the D.C. courts to use his sentence (to be handed down on March 26) as an opportunity to send society a message similar to the one channeled through Burress.  Granted, these men did in fact willfully break the law and place themselves in legal jeopardy, and illegally possessing firearms isn’t strictly a basic Second Amendment rights issue.  Still, the notion that one’s stardom—and subsequent visibility—as a star athlete makes one’s legal situation more juridically noteworthy—and therefore riper for a harsh punishment—is ludicrous and patently unfair.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that a person was a man before he was a sportsman, and Zirin quotes Dr. King’s invocation of Ali to make this point: “Like Muhammad Ali puts it,” he said in 1967, “we are all–Black and Brown and poor–victims of the same system of oppression.”  That same venal system of oppression must today be transformed into the “same system of fairness and tolerance” in which one’ status as an athlete doesn’t trump his status as a person.  If we are to eliminate prejudice based on (as is commonly cited) “race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or military status,” then we also need to eliminate “fame”-based discrimination as well.

Civil rights—and unbiased jurisprudence—need to apply to everyone equally, not more harshly to others because we think their status as athlete lends more gravitas to their respective case.  Last time I checked, Lady Justice wore a robe and carried a scale, not a zebra-suit and a whistle.