All Quiet on the Western Front… Until the Reed Communal Scream
It’s no secret that political unrest has taken hold of the world. Historically, global catastrophe like war, genocide, unjust industrialization, and the like have led to art movements and revolutions; a plethora of bottomless renaissances (or so our history books want us to believe). However, it’s been all too quiet on the Western Front in this current political climate. As people scramble for their lives amidst genocidal regimes, the average young adult is indulging in their daily dose of social media activism—leaving likes on “don’t scroll” videos and uploading AI-generated “all eyes on—” posts. As ICE releases pictures on ice.gov of strange fisher-boy-Republican-esque pictures of officers posing with their arrests, Reed’s Student Life Scoop preaches “showing up for one another.”
Well, it seems as though Reed College has finally decided that enough is enough. On February 17, Reed College hosted what they called a “Day of Reflection and Community Action.” Institutionally organized, the “Day of Reflection and Community Action” featured a collection of workshops that were led by students, staff, and faculty. The event as it showed up on the Events Calendar stated that it was a day meant to “create space for learning, feeling, dialogue, and connection.” Hosted on an average Tuesday, many Reed students were all too busy with classes, jobs, and other activities. However, there was one activity in this “Day of Reflection and Community Action” that was particularly unique. At 1:30pm, many Reedies gathered in the amphitheatre for “one big communal ‘AHHH.’”
Andrew Happy ’27 said that the planning of the “Day of Reflection and Community Action” included a lot of different initiatives. He said “what was really felt was that there wasn’t really one event that anchored and brought everyone together for one cohesive event.” And so, the idea of the Reed Community Scream was born. Cleverly, the college provided ice cream afterwards, so that as Happy reported, one can get a sticker which says “I screamed at the Reed Scream.” The event, which was planned by the Presidential Council on Campus Climate (PCCC), had a decent turnout. Dr. Karnell McConnell-Black, head of Student Life at Reed College, reflected that “we were trying to find opportunities for the community to just release.”
Despite the turnout, there were some clear critiques of the event as well. Erika Spencer ’28 states “as much as The Scream as a painting has become a performance piece of someone’s agony, the scream at Reed College is just a performance that the administration has put on to try to distract us from the actual problems instead of taking action.”