Over the last year, Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) at Carleton University has been calling for a public debate with Carleton administration officials on the question of boycotting Israeli academic institutions and, this winter, new calls are being made for the university to divest its funds of companies implicated in Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian Territories. Given these developments, it seems worthwhile to take a look back at a similar struggle that played out on Carleton's campus just over two decades ago against another system of apartheid. Indeed, there is much that might be learned from that earlier struggle.

The Waffle is long dead and little remembered. Forty years ago, at the very tail-end of the fabulous decade known as the 60s -- if you missed it, too bad -- it burst on the scene as a radical grouping within the NDP with a Manifesto calling for an independent socialist Canada, no less, and did so to media attention the likes of which the left has yet to match.

The 60s were already in trouble, Richard Nixon having been elected president of the United States and leader of the free world in 1968. Here at home, by 1972 the NDP establishment, an alliance of party and trade union brass, was unwilling to tolerate the Waffle talk inside and outside the party.

In 1982, 84 workers died when the Ocean Ranger drilling rig sank east of Newfoundland. After three years of searching for Coast Guard seaman Greg MacClennan, Newfoundland author Mike Heffernan caught up with him and collected his memories of being a crew member of one of the ships that answered the distress call in 1982.

The Hudson was tied up on the south side of St. John’s harbour. The crew stood by the railing, smoking and chatting amongst themselves. I walked up the gangway and was introduced to a giant of a man. He was bearded, his hair long in back and gathered together into a ponytail. His hands were thick and heavily calloused, swallowing my own as we made our introductions. Yet his voice was soft and his words articulate.

It looks like any other stretch of desert around Phoenix, but out here among the tumbling tumbleweed and Prickly Pear cactus sits an island of creativity, genius and some obscure historical connections. Among those linkages is a member of the family of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Where are we? It’s called Taliesin West, the Scottsdale, Arizona, home of Frank Lloyd Wright, self-described as America’s greatest architect. We’re also in McCain country and before that it was Barry Goldwater territory.

A gaggle of tourists winds its way through the labyrinth of mausoleums secluded behind the high walls of Buenos Aires's La Recoleta cemetery. Great mounds of mortar and marble dwarf the passers-by who gawk at the graves of the city's great ones - generals, priests, politicians, diplomats.

Here too lie the city's famous writers and poets. Few notice the grave of Juan Benito, a freed black slave-boy, who was the first to be interred in this quiet corner of one of the city's upper-class neighbourhoods. They stop at grave number 114 on the ten-peso cemetery map. Here rests Eva Duarte de Peron.

I am becoming invisible. This is not a function of age, although, as a woman of a "certain" age, I have been warned about my impending invisibility.

No, my pending invisibility is a direct result of American security policy. At least that's who I'm blaming. And my local postal carrier confirmed it: nothing stands between me and invisibility, except for an envelope that will be delivered, possibly, on an undetermined day sometime in the near future.

It all started innocently enough. I was moving. Changing address. Same city.