Cheap Talk About "Justice" and "Peace"
A friend asked me today for my thoughts about the “unrest” (my word) on the Columbia campus: the pro-Palestinian protests, the University calling out the NYPD to clear the trespassers from the South Lawn, the evident rise of antisemitism and intolerance generally. She, like so many people of conscience capable of non-linear thought, does not know what to think.
The events at Columbia — and at other schools, in New York City and throughout the nation — anger and frustrate me on multiple levels:
Call me old fashioned, or a wooly-headed idealist, or both: the beneficiaries of a liberal education should, first and foremost, know how to think. So kids, please: THINK. The picket lines (in front of The New School, on Fifth avenue); the drum circles (NYU students in Washington Square Park) and the tent cities (Columbia) with their brave leaders, faces wrapped in a keffiyeh to show solidarity and provide anonymity, are not engaged in any constructive endeavor. Theirs is a knee-jerk, emotional reaction to a bad situation — a situation that is largely, at this point, of Israel’s own making.
Addressing the protesters: What do you want? What would be a good outcome? What does your endgame look like? What are your actual demands, bearing in mind the following:
Words like “justice” and “peace” — or slogans like, “no justice, no peace!” — do not express anything beyond the inchoate.
Define what you mean by “justice” while acknowledged if you please, the complexity of the world. Things are not black-and-white, especially in the Middle East (checkered keffiyeh notwithstanding).
When you chant things like, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!” What is it you mean? Do you understand that you are repeating an antisemitic, genocidal slogan? Do you know what river, and what sea? Have you looked at a map?
President Shafik: I don’t envy you; but this is what you get paid for.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Ted Cruz, and the rest of the GOP clown car: not everything is an opportunity for your performative outrage. If you spent even half as much time trying to understand problems and craft solutions as you do whining about them, the world might be in better shape.
It occurred to me, as I walked around the city a few days ago — not in search of the protests, but encountering them — that these students are imitating the behavior modeled by too many politicians: a lot of talk about intractable problems with no real answers on offer. H.L. Mencken was right: for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.
These problems have been with us for generations, at least; they will not be solved by the Speaker of the House dropping in at Columbia “to fire the president” — which he manifestly lacks the power or authority to do. They will not be solved by the senator from Texas bemoaning the “cultural Marxism” that has taken root on our university campuses. And they will not be solved by the gentleladies from Georgia, North Carolina, and Colorado, and the gentlemen and ladies from points between and beyond, whose only abiding interest in the nation's problems seems to be telling the rest of us who’s to blame and why we should be very, very afraid.
I don’t want to suggest that I have all the answers, or indeed any answers: I don’t. I do, however, believe in dialog and compromise. Solving problems begins with more listening, and less talking. It’s the main lesson I took away from my liberal arts education, from my teachers at schools that include Columbia.
Slogans are easy; work is hard. And no difficult problem was ever resolved by a clever slogan.