In September, seniors read The Stranger, a work shaped by the violence of both World War I and II as well as the ugly forces of colonialism that began (in Algeria) in the 19th century. Camus wrote the book under Nazi occupation. He lost his father to war before he could speak. Back in September, reading The Stranger, we recalled a book many students had read the previous year—The Things They Carried. We discussed the absurdity of warfare, the way in which small people, innocents, can be pinioned and crushed by grand strategy, collateral damage, and cold indifference.
Children of Men, the 2006 film, is my segue to The Handmaid’s Tale. Theo (played by Clive Owen) complaining that his cigarettes aren't working but finding renewed existential purpose in self-sacrifice? A fine follow-up. A fertility crisis with a side of autocracy, bathed in societal and moral collapse? Punch that ticket to Gilead. We watched the movie the same week Israel dropped almost as many bombs on Gaza's 141 square miles as the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in any one year of that two-decade-long war. The film imagines a diseased, floundering British state employing a Patriot-Act-on-steroids to dehumanize and exterminate an overwhelmingly non-white refugee underclass population. The urban battle footage, headlines, slogans, ads, and logos reference the early-mid-00s reality one could digest via CNN—televised violence; the accepting of dubious rationales for expanding war proffered by government officials; the laundering of those rationales by media members; the bullying of other media members expressing skepticism about weapons of mass destruction or fears over the likelihood of causing irreparable harm to people—even nations—with no part in the 9/11 tragedy; the hating the war but supporting the troops. In a famous (and initially melodramatic-feeling) scene, the first baby in 18 years, born to a refugee, gurgling and fragile, stops the carnage for a few seconds. You definitely almost laugh at the sight of soldiers crossing themselves, bowing to the diapered beacon of hope, but the bitter kicker saves the moment. Someone shoots and the mayhem starts again.
Hope didn’t matter all that much.
Anyway, the government blows up a prison camp. Terrorists use innocents as symbolic pawns. I like to joke with classes that, if students are the addled 20-something son of Nigel (Theo’s wealthy cousin), a cyberpunkish tattooed emo kid who diddles compulsively on a device and dissociates so dramatically that he must be screamed at until he takes his pills, grown-ups are Nigel, who pops antidepressants like an after-dinner mint and sweeps a hand across the unending window gloom punctuated by a floating pig balloon, and, when asked how he copes with the suffering and sadness, says, “I just don’t think about it.”
One student thought about it. She raised her hand when we went over their writing. As I do every year, I’d asked them to consider the degree to which the film feels like a realistic warning.
She said, “This makes me think about what’s happening in Gaza.”
She was either brave or stupid or insightful or insensitive. It really depends on who you ask.
Last month, my junior classes began a unit about the Vietnam War. We watched parts of Hearts and Minds, a searing 1975 documentary in which pilots who bombed villages and fields wrestle with the moral consequences of their actions, from which they were, by virtue of technology, in the moment, detached. Both interviewed pilots recall taking pride in their “expertise.” One likens it to “an aria,” with the pilot being like a singer in complete control of his instrument. If you’ve ever seen a 2023 media personality go limp over footage of bombs, and you most certainly can, you get it. Of course, this pilot is sobbing by the end of the film, stricken with guilt and anger. A distraught Vietnamese man wants to send his dead daughter’s clothes to President Nixon. An old woman with a ruined farm says she has nothing. American soldiers swagger through streets and haggle with prostitutes.
Back in 2005, with the United States sunk into a two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war that inspired the imagery and rhetoric of Children of Men, Counterpunch published a piece that directly linked, via Hearts and Minds, the lessons learned in Vietnam but forgotten in Fallujah—the idea that no one views the people turning their world to rubble as liberators. The article cited one of the movie’s most memorable lines (courtesy of Sergeant William Marshall, speaking on a panel of injured veterans):
“Now you don’t wanna hear about it, well, I’ll tell you about it everyday, make you sit down and puke in your dinner, you dig, because you got me over there, and now you done brought me back here, and you wanna forget it, so somebody else can go do it somewhere else? Hell no…You’re gonna hear it all, everyday, as long as you live…”
We read Berkeley author Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir of her family's refugee experience in the 70s and 80s. In the book, Bui uses her family history to show the human cost of war (with regular people characterized as "ants scrambling" for safety). Her father’s father was a communist, his father a landowner sympathetic to the French, a believer in the forces of capitalism. Bui writes of the “refugee reflex,” capturing the hypervigilance and perpetual state of discomfort she feels constitutes an inheritance of sorts, something that was inscribed on her by a history she doesn’t really remember. Her father was paranoid and detached, often temperamental, in his own words, not “normal.” Many of my students are immigrant children whose grandparents or parents fled violence in Guatemala and El Salvador—wars that also reflect the old American fixation on battling communism wherever it might raise its head. They brace for family members to be deported or for a parent’s job to evaporate. They’ve inherited memories of political instability, poverty, and helplessness. They are sensitive to stories in which ants scramble for safety.
As William Marshall promises to never stop announcing his oft-uncomfortable truth—one strong voice, speaking from experience—Bui points out the problem with adopting simplistic narratives for complicated predicaments. She shares her father’s take on the notorious Pulitzer-winning photograph of South Vietnamese army general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street in 1968. Hearts and Minds shows a video of this same scene (I didn't play it for students). Her father didn’t like the general, who eventually had to flee to the United States, where he quietly ran a pizza shop in Virginia until his death (cancer) in 1998. Her father also didn’t like the prisoner, who was being executed for, in turn, murdering “an entire family in their home.”
The famed picture by Eddie Adams meant something to people. Bui writes that it’s been “credited with turning popular opinion in America against the war,” but that, she notes, didn’t matter to the Vietnamese whose country had been shredded, whose families were fragmented. The picture itself is not a lie—a piece of misinformation. It happened, like the piles of small people’s bodies anywhere war is waged. Misinformation isn’t just a movie set sold as real violence or a bombing “survivor” caked in ketchup “blood” for a viral video or one or both sides of a conflict lying about weapons used or targets selected.
Misinformation is also deciding that a dead body can only mean one thing and nothing else.
In class, I’ve mentioned Palestine three times in a month and a half, and only once without a student bringing it up first. I’ve never dwelled on the painfully clear connection between this current tragedy and the curricula I would have taught regardless of what was happening in the news, but I have acknowledged the responses of students and accepted their perspectives as valid. I do have personal beliefs on the subject, but I’ve never expressed them beyond the sentiment that I’m revolted by how (comparatively) profoundly privileged people casually rationalize mass civilian death as the acceptable cost of a “just” war or righteous act of rebellion, engaging in armchair strategizing, speaking from bar stools and from behind keyboards with the bravado of mediocre football coaches.
I haven’t been particularly brave. But I haven’t quite run away from anything.
Last Friday, Marin Independent Journal reported a story: approximately 35 students from three county high schools (total population, nearly 4,000 between them) participated in a walk-out protest on behalf of Palestine. This happened during the day on Friday but, to my knowledge, none of my students participated. The article reports that one student speaker used the word “genocide.” Others bore signs with the statements “cease fire now” and “end the bloodshed.” One protester’s “from the river to the sea” sign—a “hotly disputed” slogan, according to The New York Times, a line that different people conclude means vastly different things—irked a counter-protester, and, according to the article, what sounds like reasonable back-and-forth ensued. No mass murder ideation was intended—if the kid can be believed.
The story’s local interviewees—none of them students or Muslims or cease-fire proponents of any stripe—unloaded on the teens. They didn’t understand what they were protesting. They’ve “misunderstood who is attempting to annihilate whom.” They’re “misguided,” susceptible to “misinformation,” and, by protesting, caused harm to “the mental health of not only the Jewish students, but also the educational, social-emotional health of all of the students [in the] county.”
In other words, opposition to violence hurts.
The “end the bloodshed” movement has blood on its hands.
The article doesn’t report that student protesters shouted insults or tore down signs addressing the awful October 7 attacks and kidnappings by Hamas. I wouldn’t have been surprised to read that a student or two said something ugly or stupid—they do that sometimes—but nothing in the story suggests that. Again, I wasn’t there, but, despite the imbalance in perspectives, the article portrays a small but healthy bit of local political protest by kids who have probably seen disturbing images and narratives on social media—a hellish, supersized version of the newsreel footage in Hearts and Minds. And then, quite clearly, a synchronized group of significantly more powerful community stakeholders letting the kids (and anyone else) know that alternative perspectives on a single preferred storyline are unacceptable.
According to Marin Zine Club, a teen-run Instagram account, a drone clutching an Israeli flag whizzed above and around the protesters. A passing driver told the protesters that they “all should be killed.”
Do I know these things to be unvarnished fact? No.
Reading the article, I did note that none of the interviewed folks shared a particularly nuanced understanding of history or seemed interested in persuasion. It is simply not true that one group has a total monopoly on trying to annihilate the wholly innocent other. Attacks against both Jews and Muslims are on the rise in the United States. What qualifies as misguided or misinformation? Believing in the internationally accepted numbers of dead Palestinian children? The videos that victims or witnesses or supporters of any cause might record, find, fabricate, or repurpose, and soak with noble or nefarious intentions into the shit-slinging bazaar formerly known as Twitter? What is wrong or right for a student to do? Seek any relevant Palestine-Israeli context materializing over the time period between August 29, 1897 and October 6, 2023? Learn about the utopian dreams of kibbutzim? The relief that escapees from European pogroms felt when they arrived in Israel, how they processed their trauma in their new home? The West Bank settlers? The brutality of Hamas, which has not been elected to power in my students’ lifetimes? Israel’s historic treatment of the Palestinian people, which many international organizations have condemned?
Only a disingenuous person actually wants to section off pieces of a history like the most desirable portions of an unevenly frosted birthday cake. Traditionally, disingenuous people are supposed to be sneaky about this, to disguise intent in rhetorical flourishes. Not doing that now feels like part of the point. Immediately after October 7, I heard it also, to be fair, on a popular leftist podcast, when a guest and hosts marveled fairly grotesquely at what Hamas was able to do and the security implications for Israel and the horrors likely to come, and, all the while, knowingly refused to step outside the parameters of this particular game to say, as their ideological opponents were demanding, that murdering and kidnapping noncombatant civilians was wrong. It just is! And, yes, 5,000 children and counting are now dead in Gaza. Cut the number in half—does that make it better? And how many survivors injured? How many traumatized for life? How many are prepared to spend their whole lives making people sick with their truths? How many will be refugees with reflexes that alienate others, that make living and loving harder? Is this the imbalance the lunatic ledger requires? A nest egg of misery, of future festering rage and rebellion? Why is there not more space in people’s hearts and minds? Finding some bland space in the center of conflicts is not the goal. Some truths are uncomfortable and we cannot pretend they don’t exist as we choose what we value most. We should be frank about our calculations. Students should learn that this is the way.
It is true that students don’t do the reading. I am not surprised that the Marin protesters’ detectors made this point—even if they gave little indication that they had either. I bemoan this in my classroom, obviously. I’ve been doing a new bit in my senior classes. I welcome students to “the citadel of ideas” and let them know that rent is free in this messy but verdant metropolis, that homes may even be purchased if one desires to live permanently in the light of learning and thinking and finding new art-borne ways to understand the self and its surroundings. When a kid shrugs that they did not bother reading the 250-word excerpt of a 1,500-word excerpt of a nonfiction book designed to help them gain some meager sense of a fiction’s real-life relevance, I can say, “Alas—you have declined to take up residence in the citadel of ideas.” Sometimes, I warn them of instead moving their shit to the arid “suburb of ignorance,” a deceptively shiny prison, a sterile-ass promontory if there ever was one. Anyone in, say, 1st period, knows the routine. Sorry.
The thing is, morality doesn’t necessarily require nuance. Maybe those teen demonstrators haven’t done the reading. In the article, teachers were presented as very eager to demonstrate that they were not encouraging students to protest, that there’s no antisemitism problem at their school, and so forth. What defines a problem? By my standards, I think there probably is one—an antisemitism problem—at nearly any diverse school of size, and usually from the same sources inclined to disparage Muslims or Black kids or trans students—not the kids who organize a walk-out for Palestine. Whether ignorant or aggrieved or insecure or bigoted, students can be terrible to one another, reflecting, in clunky trollish fashion, the worst aspects of the larger world outside. And in my experience, the activism-minded students where I teach are no less enthusiastic about fighting antisemitism than other forms of bigotry.
A group of 35 kids is also not a monolith. That’s one crowded classroom: 35 stories, parents, guardians, siblings, histories, values, faiths. If they’re protesting on the basis of feeling, on the grounds that, while they may not know about the Nakba or the Yom Kippur War, they do believe that one heinous act doesn’t need to beget another, that it is always wrong to launch missiles at children, even if some experts insist that enemies hide beneath their cribs, that they’re being used as shields. If they’re being used as shields, why shoot? That is a highly defensible moral position even in the event that these students might know next to nothing about this part of the world and its history. A simple response to a disingenuously simplistic narrative.
Anyway, so I saw the article on the shit-slinging bazaar formerly known as Twitter, and I couldn’t help myself. I did the unwise, I suppose. I announced myself as a teacher at one of the area schools and I commented:
A condescending tone from a number of quoted stakeholders re: teen protesters. There is no ignorance or moral failure in mourning the loss of thousands of Palestinian children (as well as Israeli innocents) and disputing the justness of this war’s prosecution.
I didn’t mean that the student protestors were uniformly beyond reproach; I was not there. I meant that the article did not quote them but cast them as callous, antisemitic (though nonviolent) brats when one can, without being stupid or wrong or bigoted, say that the killing is impossible to stomach and protest accordingly. One can also claim that there is no lasting military solution to this place’s problems, that “eliminating” an idea like Hamas at the expense of thousands of children doesn’t work this way. These are streets on which you can live in the citadel of ideas.
Within minutes, the retaliations appeared. The kids in the article were smart not to share their names.
As a teacher I would hope you would teach critical thinking and analysis, but on that subject your grade is an F!
What about our Jewish students here? What are you doing to speak up for them?
Will be sure to let our friends at SRHS know how you feel.
There were worse ones but they’ve been deleted. While I’m inclined to doubt the authenticity of some of these accounts, and yes, this is the nature of the bazaar, on some level, I welcome the frail attempts at bullying. I’m Jewish by birth (though devoutly secular)—not that it really matters. But I have thought about my family from Germany, France, and Romania, who, in the very early 20th century, made their way to the United States, why they came, how they felt in the places they left behind. As I write in the darkness of my now-empty home, my family is flying to another country, and I’m feeling a bit mushy about my sweet kid, how she cried in the car because she didn't want to leave me, how she made us lunch on Saturday, painstakingly slicing cheese for what felt like hours as we sat, playing along, hungry but charmed. My family will return in ten days. Like many parents, I feel a sense of shared humanity and pain for the intractable horrors that other families experienced on October 7, before October 7, and since October 7.
I’ve done a lot of reading but this is the thing that’s hardest to carry around.
And if this, absurdly, improbably, is what lands me in hot or at least lukewarm water, I will, with Meursaultian relish, cheer my fate, all the more convinced of my correctness.