Peaceful protests are ongoing during the 2024 Union Fest at the University of Wyoming Simpson’s plaza.
At 2:00 p.m., a group of approximately 50 individuals organized themselves together to perform a vigil for the totality of lives lost in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It’s going on nationwide, as so far as more loud protests, but it’s Wyoming, a much more conservative state and this University has a history of very bad things happening to people for speaking up, so we wanted to keep it pretty neutral and focus on mourning the people who have been lost because it’s not about us,” said Beckham Carver, a Computing Science major.
The group displays signs reading information about the 35,734 people who have died in the conflict in total.
The group intends on staying one second for one life.
“If we were to stay here for one second for one life, that’s an entire human being, you would get through the Isralei’s in about 19 minutes which sounds awful enough,” Carver said. “But for the Palestinians it’s nine hours and 37 minutes.”
Since then, another group has popped up across from the vigil with their own peaceful protest.
“I don’t think anti-semistism has a place on our campus,” Blake Ogen, a freshman in the College of Business.
“I understand the idea of supporting humanitarian aid to Palestine but at the end of the day, it all ends up in Hamas hands. . . It’s more of a – just show the other side we’re here. It’s not like a counter protest, we are just hanging out.”
The display of both flags has brought increased attention from Union Fest goers and community onlookers.
“Last night we got some information that was going to be a different direction, or that some other individuals were going to take the vigil in a direction against the wishes of the organizers,” UW Police Chief Josh Holland said.
“We kind of increased our presence for that purpose cause we certainly respect the First Amendment right. We want to see that people are able to exercise their rights the way they want to and not have it disturbed,” said Holland.
The group flying the American flag noted that they would leave once the Union Fest concert started, whereas the Israeli-Palestinian protesters intend to stay the full duration of 35,734 seconds with the estimated end of their protest actions around 11:30 p.m.
The Branding Iron will provide updates as they develop.
