THOSE CRAZY BRANDEISIANS DEPT.: My old college newspaper, The Justice, ran a photo poll last week (not online) asking the provocative question "Who do you hate more- George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein?" As though it's actually a debatable question whether the homicidal dictator of an anti-American rogue nation is more deserving of hatred than the President of the United States- as Uncle Junior would say, where do they get the effrontery?
But even stranger was a letter to the editor this week chastising the Justice editors for asking such a question- not because of the Bush/Saddam moral equivilance, but because they dared suggest that anyone "hate" anyone else. Wake up people- hate is a naturally occuring human emotion (as Andrew articulates better than I ever could), and there's nothing wrong with hating what is evil and loving what is good.
Sophomore Jonathan Lerner, however, has the right idea- writing exactly the kind of stuff I would've been writing had I been around 'deis in the post-9/11 days. It's great to see someone at Brandeis has the guts to stand up to the neo-Stalinist "activist" crowd- God knows not enough people did in my day.
The problem with college students and others who have never lived in "the real world" is that everything political or geopolitical is an abstraction to them. From tax policy to terrorism, if you haven't lived it it's just something your professor talks about and nothing more. That's why students at Brandeis and other places place Bush and BinLaden on roughly even terms- since they didn't experience 9/11 personally, the perpetrators of that are roughly equal with the guy who's against the Kyoto Treaty. Unfortunately, this isn't a problem that can be solved by the world's smartest professors nor by $30,000 a year.