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Sara Rath, Eleanor Brussell and Eleanor Belsor (from left) protest in West Los Angeles on Friday

Driving through a normally quiet suburban neighborhood of West Los Angeles, I’ve come across some of the most ardent protestors of the Iraq war in this city.

The group of approximately 15 local residents who show up outside of Mar Vista Park every Friday night is not any larger or louder than the demonstrations that one sees occasionally outside of the Federal Building, but they are distinguished by two things: in the age of their members and their consistency.

The local residents are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s, and have been holding up signs protesting the Iraq war for several years.

“We started coming out here prior to the invasion (of Iraq),” said Lillian Gaskin, a 67 year-old retired teacher.

The protestors hold up signs and cheer as motorists passing by honk their horns in solidarity.

“We are basically reinforcing other people’s feelings of concerns, giving them support,” Gaskin told me when I asked her why they were so persistent.

As a member of the generation labeled apathetic, I began to wonder why it was our parents out on the streets holding signs.

UCLA has traditionally been an active campus, and when I started here three years ago I expected to witness more of that typically left-leaning voice that college students are known for.

Instead, I’ve seen scattered political protests, many held by groups based off campus.

The student activism that I do see is from within structured student groups such as CalPIRG, and protests such as the one last week regarding minority admissions are by no means at the scale experienced by many of our parents.

In order to better understand the differences between campus today and the UCLA of 40 years ago, I talked to John Sandbrook, executive officer of business and administrative services. Sandbrook went to UCLA as an undergraduate in the 1960s, when he wrote for the Daily Bruin. He has worked on the campus ever since.

Sandbrook started at UCLA in 1967, the academic year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and then the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Students protesting both the Vietnam War and race relations were common.

The next year, the black studies program opened. Two Black Panthers were shot dead in Campbell Hall over a dispute over who would head the African American Studies center.

In 1969, the lottery changed for the draft. Ping-pong balls with dates were picked at random, and those with birthdays on the dates picked closer to the beginning were likely to be drafted.

“I had told myself if my birthday was in the top third ... then I would enlist to dictate what I was going to do,” Sandbrook said. “But my birthday was picked 345 out of 365.”

“My life was changed because of the ping-pong ball,” he said.

In a demonstration against the American incursion into Cambodia in 1970 and the subsequent National Guard shooting of four Kent State students during a protest, about 4,000 students gathered on campus, he said.

Los Angeles police officers in riot gear ordered them to disperse and then chased them through campus, he said.

The governor temporarily closed state schools.

In 1972, basketball star Bill Walton was arrested during a protest.

The enormity of the events of the late 1960s and ’70s is almost hard to imagine.

“There was a real fear that the country would rip itself apart,” Sandbrook said. “It was very heavy times.”

Even student activism around the time that the United States began its war with Iraq is nothing compared to what it was, Sandbrook said.

But the relative quiet of our campus may not be a matter of apathetic youth. For many undergraduates, the Iraq war was the first truly divisive political event of our lives. But we have never faced a draft, never seen a ping-pong ball with our birthday on it.

The activism that does exist shows its face in a different form.

The students of the ’60s and ’70s carved pathways for our generation to use, forcing the creation of policies regarding students’ right to protest.

And today’s student activism often takes on a new dimension.

The student movement to divest UC money from Sudan held some rallies and protested at UC Regents meetings. But where they were really effective was in their organization and their sophisticated long-term options that they presented in their interactions with the regents.

Last year students displayed controversial cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad that were denounced throughout the Muslim world to discuss the issue of free speech.

As elections roll around, students update their online profiles with the campaign issues that they care about and support.

That isn’t apathy. It is activism at a different scale, in a different form, at a different time.

E-mail Mishory at jmishory@media.ucla.edu.