Déjâ Vu All Over Again

Last Wednesday, when the pro-war and anti-war forces were exercising their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble on College Walk, I briefly joined in the pro-war chorus. I did so not because I am entirely sure I support the war--I'm not--but because the pro-war camp is the one least likely to attempt a disruption of classes or a takeover of class or administration buildings. It is not the pro-war camp that has been scribbling its propaganda on blackboards and circling them with the ill-heeded words, "Do Not Erase." And, on Thursday, it was not a group of pro-war demonstrators who walked up the steps of Low Library and demanded an immediate audience with President Bollinger, disregarding the normal protocols of arranging a meeting with heads of the university.

Until the day of the walk-out, I had always considered myself mainly apolitical. Growing up in a family that lived, breathed, and ate the Democratic Party, I quickly learned the constant sense of futility and disappointment deep commitment to a political cause can bring.

I also learned that fanatical political dogma is not much better than fanatical religious dogma in terms of its ability to blind people to truth. And I am saddened that, at Columbia, so many people seem to be so horrendously blind, at least when it comes to Iraq. One side tells us to sit back and ignore civilian casualties and have faith that humanitarian aid will soon reach the Iraqi people. The other tells us that, in the name of diversity, we have to tolerate Hussein's brutal treatment of the Kurds, women, and dissidents and urges us to treat every misinformed anti-American rant as a statement of objective truth. Even Oedipus, after causing his own blindness, was not so blind to truth, horrifying though it was.

When I stood with the pro-war camp on the steps of Low Library, I did so not so much in solidarity with the pro-war cause as in solidarity with my generation's aspirations to an independent identity. It is time that Generation Y broke free of its parents' overheated passions. It is time our generation stopped making the lens of the Vietnam War our own, time we relegated that insipid excuse for intellectual endeavor known as the "teach-in" to the Salvation Army along with our parents' tie-dyed shirts and love beads. No event that calls itself a "teach-in" ever presents fair or balanced information on its topic. Teach-ins exist only to allow political ideologues in academia the chance to delude themselves into thinking they matter, or to grant themselves a reprieve from the quaint notion, still held by a few of us vanishing troglodytes, that academia is supposed to be impartial and objective. Last Wednesday's teach-in, which coincided all too conveniently with the equally futile anti-war walkout, was no exception, as Nicholas De Genova's inflammatory comments amply demonstrated. 2003 can never be 1968, and, frankly, 1968 wasn't much fun the first time around--at least not for that portion of campus who oddly thought college was about discovering Max Weber, not taking over Hamilton.

What, let us ask, did 1968 actually accomplish? From reading Up Against the Ivy Wall, a first-hand account of the student strike written by a former reporter for the Spectator, the answer appears to me to be nothing. It certainly didn't end the Vietnam War, which dragged on for another seven years beyond the clash of police and students on our fine campus. The most lasting effect it had on the world outside of Columbia was to prevent the construction of a gym in Morningside Park. And this single concession to student demands cost the residents of Morningside Heights and Harlem the use of a new gym, all in the interests of preserving what is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest parks I have ever seen.

As far as I can tell, the real legacy of 1968 was years of administration and student mistrust, bulletproof plastic replacements for the windows of campus buildings, the sullying of Columbia's reputation as an academic institution, and havoc for those students who came to Morningside Heights to study Restoration theater or Keynesian economics. It was hardly an inspiration to my generation--even those of my generation whose aspirations do not lie in the world of investment banking.

Campus turmoil does nothing to ease real-world turmoil. Teach-ins only teach one side of an issue to take its own rhetoric as gospel and avoid any reasoned discussion with the other side that might lead to--gasp!--compromise and consensus.

If I am nostalgic about any part of the 1960s, it is for those fleeting, idyllic years before protests started popping up like Saudi oil wells, for the days of the Kennedy Administration and the early Johnson years before Vietnam so deeply divided the public. Almost alone among my peers, I long for the days when broad consensus existed to move forward on Civil Rights and the Great Society, when the nation was less preoccupied with preserving group loyalties and intellectuals had not yet concluded that interpreting another culture or another point of view was synonymous with cultural imperialism. We have despaired of ever understanding the Other, and therefore we are afraid to talk to him. Instead we can only shout tired slogans at him across the cobblestones of College Walk.

J.R. Wilheim is a Columbia College senior concentrating in history and religion.