Protest Central Seeks a Few Good Recruits

A corridor of causes greets those who enter the University of California campus. Students stationed at booths and card tables in Sproul Plaza promote everything from the Campus Recycling and Refuse Center to a “Date Auction” for the romantically unattached.

Assorted political action groups, alumni clubs and honor societies are represented. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a booth, as does the exhaustively named Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration by Any Means Necessary.

At the end of this gantlet Thursday, an older man in a yellow cap sprawled on the ground and oinked -- in apparent protest of federal pork. Two students paced with picket signs. One pitched a business club’s “Interview and Networking Workshop.” The other advertised a horror movie.

A few paces beyond all of this, just past the Sather Gate archway, a bearded young man in a white T-shirt and coffee-stained carpenter jeans beckoned to passersby with strips of black fabric.

“Wear a black armband to show your opposition to the war?” he would ask, offering a cloth strip with both hands and slightly bowing his head. “Would you like to help build the student antiwar movement?”

His name was Snehal Shingabi. A 27-year-old graduate student and a member of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, he would spend the bulk of the afternoon trying to coax students into armbands. He was unfailingly polite and would bounce with enthusiasm toward every extended arm.

“This is the easiest thing I have ever done,” he gushed at one point.

Still, most of the students would scurry by -- heads down, eyes averted, veering away -- displaying avoidance skills that must come in handy navigating the panhandlers who work the Berkeley streets.

A patient proselytizer, Shingabi was unruffled by rejection.

“I think there is a lot of opposition to war,” he said, talking in bursts between pitches. “But the biggest problem is that people don’t know what to do, how to show it. We’re out here to let them know there’s an antiwar movement on campus.”

He caught the eye of a young woman lugging a backpack that would have tested a Marine’s carrying capacity.

“Wear a black armband to show your opposition to war ...”

She stopped, arms folded, shoulders hunched against her load, thinking. Then she smiled brightly. “I would totally love to,” she said, “but I’m involved in a lot of other stuff.”

“No problem,” Shingabi said, matching her smile, tooth for tooth.

“Would you like to wear an armband to show your opposition to the war?” he began again, recasting his black lure toward a student who appeared to be both lost and in a hurry.

“Yeah, I’ll wear one,” she said, cutting the pitch short, “but, like, where’s the library?”

He tied on the cloth and pointed.

Those who accepted Shingabi’s armbands were pointed toward a table filled with antiwar leaflets and asked to jot down their e-mail addresses for future communications. Some did. Many didn’t. In an hour’s time, 11 people had signed up.

“You won’t give this to the FBI, will you?” one recruit asked, looking sideways at a silver-haired fellow with a reporter’s notepad. “Oh well,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing wrong with this, right?”

Finally, Shingabi would urge them to join a contingent of students at a San Francisco antiwar rally in mid-February. The idea, he explained to each, “is to give students a sense of what a student protest feels like.”

Campuses are caldrons of curiosity. Shingabi was asked more than once why the arm bands were black, not green. He explained that the idea was to mourn the deaths of war to come, and he would rattle off a series of alarming numbers.

“I have a problem with the whole armband deal,” one student complained.

“Wear it on your leg, then?” Shingabi suggested.

“What arm do I put it on?” another asked.

“Either one,” he said. “There is no symbolism to right or left.”

Shingabi grew up in Houston. His father, an immigrant from India, worked in the oil business as a petrochemical engineer. He has been at Berkeley for six years and is working toward a doctorate in English, exploring early 20th century Indian fiction in English -- “which,” he suggested, “is probably more than you want to know about me.”

He joined the campus antiwar group when it formed shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. His view is that the loss of the World Trade Center, however tragic, was manipulated almost from the start by an administration bent on war and empire-building in the Middle East.

“I think everybody saw it coming,” Shingabi said, ripping more black cloth as he spoke. “Instead of mourning anybody, this government just rushed off to war. They didn’t make the world safer. They didn’t bring democracy to Afghanistan.”

In the last few months, he said, awareness about the potential for war -- along with wariness -- has grown among students. More than 1,000 names, he said, have been added to the e-mail list -- and that’s even before the first bomb has fallen.

“A lot of media have come here,” he said, “and they always want to know, ‘Is it like the ‘60s yet? When will it be like the ‘60s?’ But they don’t have any idea what the ‘60s were like.”

What is forgotten, Shingabi said, is that campus protests did not explode in size until well into the Vietnam War. In his view, the amount of stop-the-war activity in the works already is impressive -- given the fact that there is, as yet, no war to stop.

He has little doubt, though, that there will be a war: “I think if George Bush doesn’t go to war, he’s not going to be president. I think he has staked his whole career on this war happening.”

And when war does come, there won’t be enough black armbands on campus to go around.

And now Shingabi caught the eye of a lanky fellow lost in musical bliss.

“Will you wear a black armband to show your opposition to the war?”

Off came a set of earphones.

“What?”

“Will you wear a black armband to help build the student antiwar movement?”

“Not today, man, not today.”

“That’s OK,” Shingabi said, letting any question about tomorrow dangle unspoken in the soft afternoon breeze.