Yesterday the front page of the Daily showed a student with her back turned to the camera and referred to her as “a student from Syria.” We refrained from naming her and showing her face to comply with her wishes; she fears recriminations against her family still in Syria for her public activities here.

We laud our peer from Syria’s bravery by speaking out at all and recognize the exceptional nature of her case as opposed to ours (none of our families are foreign nationals).

While there is something wrong with a world in which people fear such exposure, we must protest our current culture’s refusal to take any real risks. Real protests are inconvenient for both parties involved. We should not fear inconvenience or refrain from exercising our rights to speech, press, assembly and petition because of it.

On campus, student protests and demonstrations are more or less confined to a small free speech zone outside the library. Moreover, groups are not allowed to make the gravity of their message real by causing a real disturbance for university officials. Occupy ISU might march around campus for a couple hours and the College Republicans might host Conservative Coming Out Week, but they must adhere closely to standards of order.

The actions have to be real to have any meaning. Politics can’t be done in a closet or facing a wall; if issues impact the whole university community, or if the causes championed nowadays seem to indicate (think of protests against economic inequality, Iowa State’s partnership in Tanzania with Agri-Sol and Rally for Syria), global issues prevail in our minds, then they should have a serious impact.

Maybe we shouldn’t carry around signs that say, “This is what democracy looks like!” or claim that we have a First Amendment right to say what we want.

Maybe thousands of students, irate about university policy on, say, the use of coal in our power plant or the layoffs of faculty, should mass outside Beardshear Hall, organize a few spokespeople and refuse to leave until someone in a position to speak for the university, such as President Steven Leath, comes outside to assuage their concerns.

We are not advocating violence, or even necessarily civil disobedience. But until women start burning real bras again instead of carrying signs showing bras burning, as some protesters for women’s reproductive rights have done, we will not as a culture be forced to confront the disturbing truth that the activism of the 1960s and ’70s is dead, that our political culture is no longer vibrant or life-changing.