Protesting is a little different here in Santiago, Chile. “The anarchists decide to take over our campus about three our four times a year,” said my friend Cesar from the University of Chile. “We’re surprised it hasn’t happened yet this year,” he added, “It’s very normal.”

Our conversation followed the May 1 holiday for the International Day of the Workers — Labor Day everywhere but in the United States. As usual in Chile, the peaceful labor union marches were interrupted by occasional rioting.

There are always a number of young people who take it upon themselves to try and break things (obviously windows are just symbols of capitalist oppression) and fight the cops that are employed for crowd control. They do it in the name of labor, sometimes socialism and occasionally anarchy, but I don’t think the real workers appreciate it very much. It confuses the legitimacy of the unions with the chaos of the troublemakers.

“Every year, it’s always the same,” my host mother sighed as we watched the news. “They get together, throw rocks and someone gets hurt.”

Chile’s civil police, the carabineros, are pros at dealing with this sort of thing. They even have a special crowd control tank with a high powered water hose as a turret. It’s called a guacon, named after a breed of spitting llamas. In my first week here I happened to be downtown when an impromptu protest broke out, stopping traffic, and the guacon cut things very short. I guess it’s hard to protest when you’re soaking wet.

When I read about last week’s small anti-war demonstration by Stanford Says No to War, it made me kind of nostalgic. The demonstration, complete with a hilarious-sounding reenactment of Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech, was not big, but it seemed to get the job done. The speech even attracted a double-parody as someone leaned out of a nearby building shouting farcical rhetoric about all the reasons war could be great.

The contrast with Chile reminded me that I kind of like the protests at Stanford. All of them. For Israel, against Israel, sweat-free, fair hiring, to remember New Orleans, to condemn the government of Burma and of course, anti-Rumsfeld.

With a few fun variations like performances, hunger strikes, sit-ins and nudity, the mechanics follow a similar pattern. Student activists gather along with a smattering of older “community members” — no one is ever sure how these people found out about the protest, but some are pretty cool if you take the time to talk to them — and then the speeches, chants and sign waving begin for the cause. The crowd is sometimes mobile, sometimes not.

When it is all over, the students all still have problem sets and papers, so the end is usually anticlimactic. There is often coverage in The Daily, and if it’s really big there might even be reporters from local papers. In the interviews, participants are praised, Stanford’s institutional stance toward social activism is usually condemned and protesters denounce apathy on the part of the student body that decided not to show up.

Does this sound cynical? Maybe, but I really do enjoy the protests. I’ve never had the fire, or nerve or time management skills to participate much, but it is good to see what other students are passionate about. Even though I don’t support an immediate withdrawal, I’m truly sorry to have missed the Mission Accomplished speech.

What was disappointing about the anti-war protest was when the leader of the group reverted to the same frustration with the entire student body’s apathy that so many other groups have already worn out. “[The student body is] concerned more on making our resumes look good than trying to solve serious issues,” he told The Daily.

First, I’d be curious to know whether the protestors have anti-war leadership on their resumes. If not, maybe they should. Are serious issues and resumes entirely separate spheres? And regardless, while some students are apathetic, many do care about “serious issues.” But they can’t care about all of them all the time. Most people have one or two ones they really care about, from saving cheap birth control to demanding action on Darfur. If you summed the number of activists for all the serious issues, you’d have a higher percentage of the undergraduates than you might think.

On a campus with a small undergraduate population and heavy workload, we should not be ashamed if our protests are small. The majority of Stanford students may not be radical enough to get hosed down or overthrow the school for a few hours, and yeah, they may want to do their homework. But measuring commitment by willingness to neglect other responsibilities is a questionable rubric. Some students are apathetic, but for many of us, it is wrong to say that we don’t care, even if we don’t all go to every demonstration.

Been in a protest lately? Let Michael know at wilkerson "at" stanford.edu.