No More Division

I didn’t support the hunger strike, but I don’t want to talk about that right now. Instead I want to talk about your reaction as you read that first sentence. Chances are, you’ve already formed a strong opinion on this column. Maybe I’ve incurred your disapproval, or earned an emphatic nod of agreement. I’ll risk both possibilities—think of me as an anti-hunger striker. As such, reading Spectator the past few days has been an awful experience.

On Nov. 14, Aries Dela Cruz said the choice to support the hunger strike or to dissent defines “either your humanity or your willingness to accept and reproduce the institutional machine.” On Nov. 15, Atossa Abrahamian described a Facebook group opposing the strike as “spiteful” and “infantile,” labeling its members “closed-minded.” On Nov. 16, Candace Mitchell drew a sharp and relevant line between the “silent . . . inactive” and “disengaged,” and those “willing to remain engaged, alert, and unfazed.” I agreed wholeheartedly with this distinction, but unhappily noted that her terms implicitly separated the hunger strike supporters from an abstract “silent majority.”

Three days and three Spec opinion articles, all with the same mentality. You’ll notice that all of these quotes come from pro-strikers, but turn to Bwog or Ivygate and it becomes clear that the same mentality has taken over our entire campus. We’ve drawn lines in the dust, declared our allegiances, and joined our respective Facebook groups. Membership in a Facebook group now determines whether politics are offensive or legitimate. People have literally gone through their Facebook network and removed everyone who disagreed with them from their list of friends. Of course, we can’t avoid conflict, but I’m disappointed and disheartened by our collective response. I scarcely need to say that I share some of the blame, for I’ve had my share of knee-jerk responses.

The hunger strike has ended, but the ensuing conversations have just begun. This campus needs to examine where we’ve come in the past week, and what sort of tenor we plan to have in the future. For the next weeks and months and years, these conversations will continue. We’ll discuss the issues the strikers (validly) bring forth and—just as importantly for many—the tactics of a hunger strike, and whether they redefine the relationship between the administration and the student body. The rest of this paragraph is all I’ll say in this column about my decision to join the anti-hunger strike Facebook group, so listen up: I wouldn’t support a handful of students demanding that the administration cede 10 cents to the Darfur crisis (an undeniably good cause!) any more than I’d support demands for a required class on the history of Iowan yodeling (not so brilliant). Basically, I don’t think students should issue ultimatums to their university.

See, I devolved into opinion. That’s something that can be debated, and therefore is not something that this column was intended to be about. Before any of these conversations begin, we need to take a step back. We need to reject the history of this past week in black and white terms. Our campus dialogue contains more dichotomies of good and evil than Bush talking about the Axis of Evil. When dealing with these sorts of polemical issues, there are precious few inherent and obvious facts that divide the student body into people of “conscience and justice” or “comfort and convenience.”

I should note here that the above quotation is from the article of a guy I’ve met, who seems to be a bright and passionate person—well on his way to winning my respect. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the other two columnists I quoted, but I know one of the strikers and—though I disagree with her decisions over the past week—I have no doubt that she believes she’s acted justly. We need to remember that all of us—with the possible exception of anonymous Internet posters—believe we’re right.
Please don’t think that I’m arguing on behalf of moral relativism, or against intellectual rigor. I believe in ideals of right and wrong, justice and injustice—though I recognize how tricky these concepts become when applied to issues, events, or people. Since our campus is so fiercely divided, then, it follows that some of us are wrong. Some of us need to be educated further, to be more sensitive or more rational, or to relinquish some opinions.

I may be a first-year, but I’m not as naïve as I sound. If we were able to answer these types of questions, we’d have world peace, and I don’t see much indication of that possibility on the horizon. If we don’t start making an effort, though, we won’t stand a chance. As students at a university like Columbia, we really should be setting a better example.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.