After nine days of a liquid diet the awesome hunger strikers of Princeton collapsed. Immuno-compromised, ethically compromised and feeling both hot and cold at the same time, they threw in the towel.
But good news, they’ve come up with a daring new concept in hunger strikes; relay-hunger! That’s right, just like in relay-races where one runner hands over the baton to the next runner, relay-fasters hand over the fast to a new faster at each (convenient) step in the hunger strike.
It’s brilliant and also allows each of us strikers to employ our own lived experience of what defines starvation. For instance, personally, I always find that the period between 10:33 am and 11:17 am is a crisis time for me. At that point my energy reserves from my 9:30 snack are completely gone and the forty three minutes until lunch are literally (figuratively?) torture. And so that is why I have designated 10:33 am and 11:17 am my leg of the relay hunger strike. I feel that I am almost dying for my beliefs.
But luckily I won’t have to die. And the best part is I’ll be able keep this hunger strike going for twenty or thirty years. Now that’s what I call progress.