Had it not really happened, the incident would certainly had been brushed off as some (conservative) writer's wishful thinking, the meeting of Nixon with the agitating students in the small hours at the Lincoln Memorial, during the height of Vietnam war protests. Nothing substantial came off it anyway, there were no ideas exchanged, no debates happened, Nixon didn't end up empathizing with the students, nor the students came around to the President's hardline stance of expanding the war to the neighboring country. What it did end up doing was humanize Nixon, to a certain extent, in the eyes of a generation that was dead against winding up dead in a country that it couldn't pinpoint on a map, in a war that had nothing to do with their country. Nixon and the students went their separate ways after that night, with both the war and the protests continuing unabated, leaving the hopefuls wondering what could had happened, had that moment been a truly transformative one where both sides came together, sat and discussed, and all importantly, understood each other’s' positions and something substantial indeed came out of it. Which begs the question, why doesn't it happen more often, or even, at all?
In the telugu movie "Anuksam", a septuagenarian Chief Minister driving along in his convoy, happens to chance upon a tent on the side of road, where a bunch of garlanded students are sloganeering (with a banner behind informing their resolve of fasting unto death) about some "student issues". He stops the convoy, walks into the tent, engages them in a conversation, and resolves them right then and there, leaving the students elated, the officials gob smacked, and himself, with one less issue to worry about it. Again, fiction, but why couldn't it be an everyday task, for men in power, to pencil in some time in their daily calendars, speaking to the dissenting segments in the governed, hearing the issues directly without any filters of the administrative apparatus, and seek to solve them, or at least express intent of solving them. Because, sometimes, the intention speaks volumes than the execution itself.
....And it actually did happen, one day. The case of the President Obama inviting a white police officer and a black professor to the White House, who were at the opposite ends of a mistaken burglary charge with the professor claiming racial profiling and the officer sticking to his routine procedure (and the President doing himself no favors, by shooting his mouth off about the police department without getting all his facts straight), is one of pure common sense. Obviously, all the three parties involved made a mistake, but the President had the modesty to admit to his mistake, and in a very rare gesture from someone occupying the highest seat of office in the country, simply invited both the aggrieved parties to his house to talk it over a glass of beer. That's about it, the police officer and the professor walked away, hopefully understanding the other person's position, and the President might have heaved in relief defusing a racial incident. Surely, the President cannot (re)solve every incident that has every likelihood of turning into a protest, but the mere gesture from people in the highest position (not just the intermediaries), of trying to understand the core issue, definitely goes a long way towards defusing a potential powder-keg.
'The trial of the Chicago 7', a real life trial of a group of individuals who are made to stand trial for a protest, that eventually turned into a riot, in Chicago against the Vietnam war in the late 60s, was another missed opportunity of what could had been, had the powers that be sat across the table with the agitating students, hipsters, and peaceniks, who wanted to stage their protests against the war at an event that would had the highest visibility of the times, the Democratic National Convention, in 1968. The police intervened, the agitators were scattered, a few skulls were cracked, and the government decided to make an example of the protesters by throwing the book against them, with 1. conspiracy to incite a riot, 2. planning to overthrow the government, (and like the saying, 'Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel'), 3. the sedition act. The same politicians would scream of tone-deafness of the government, when in opposition, expressing solidarity towards the protesting class, immediately moves in to put down agitations of any kind, when they get into power. What, about the power, makes the ruling class really insecure when it comes to protests, remains an unanswered question across civilizations, generations and revolutions. Though the two-pronged solution to nip them in the bud - one by letting the protests happen to let the steam off of the agitation, and two, bring them to the table to understand, and if possible, address/resolve, the root problem - stares every administration right in the face, and as history would bear witness, they find their own unique way to sidestep the path of commonsense and take the road of most resistance.
All the recent protests (ripped off the headlines) - the Black Lives Matter protests, the student protests at Delhi's JNU, the agitations against the National Register of Citizens, and the more local, the student unrest during Rohith Vemula - bear the same signature of being allowed/ignored to bloom into a mushroom cloud of violence, resulting not just in the loss of life and property, but the worst of all, seeding distrust in the young minds against the society, in general, and power, in particular, which would then take years, if not decades (or sometimes, never) to heal the wounds. Except the Tiananmen Sqaure incident, the one and only case when an administrative machinery successfully crushed down a raging agitation, and successfully buried all traces of it, there is no other movement in recorded history that didn't leave a trace . When would they learn, or, do they ever???
'The trial...' is the most un-Sorkin movie that doesn't have his usual tropes of fast, snappy, talk over each other dialogue, over the top idealism, mini/episodic flourishes or any such kind. The movie is handled with the gravity it deserves and true to the times, treated more as a tragedy, a miscarriage of opportunity.
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