Dear Media, Stop Taking Students Too Seriously
Protests are being exploited by journalists looking for clicks.
Because I am Jewish, friends send me news about Jews, even though I’ve repeatedly asked all my friends to never send me news at all, regardless of their religious or racial focus. This is for two reasons. The first reason I avoid news is because I suffer, like most people today, from Constant News Negativity, or CNN for short, coupled with debilitating FOX (Frenzy of Outright Exaggeration), both of these results of the Information Anxiety Complex (IAC). I would struggle through it, of course, because a good and concerned citizen today must follow every news story from everywhere in the world, no matter how suicidal the onslaught makes him, but my shrink says if I increase the dosages of my anxiety medication any further, they will start interfering with my depression medications. The second reason I avoid news is because of the paradox of our 24/7/365/Facebook News/Social Media/AI/Deep Fake world: news is everywhere and yet there’s no way of knowing what’s actually taking place.
Lately, the news I am being sent is about the Gaza War protests at college campuses.
It’s pretty grim.
Before I continue, allow me to present my macabre suffering bonafides, as is required to hold an opinion in today’s Victims Only world: I have close family and dear friends in Israel; I have a friend whose sister and brother-in-law were taken hostage by Hamas and murdered; I have a friend who is Palestinian, a fourth-generation Gazan, whose home was hit by an Israeli rocket and whose nephews and cousins are dead. I would love to take a side, but I know people suffering on both, so the luxury the college students have is sadly unavailable to me.
As for the protests themselves, what am I to believe? Some media reports say the hate and violence at the college protests is coming from Jew-hating students, some media reports say the hate and violence is coming from outside agitators, some say the hate and violence is widespread and some say the hate and violence is being exaggerated. I saw an image of a Seder table at one of the protests that one site reported as a mockery of the Jewish holiday by anti-Semitic protestors, and another that reported it as a Seder table arranged by Jewish protestors underlining the holiday’s theme of freedom from oppression. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL said he went to Columbia and it’s all very anti-Semitic, but the ADL makes a lot of money saying everything is anti-Semitic, and the ADL has castrated that term forever, an issue I’ve written about before and before and before. And so, putting aside for a moment the question of who is doing what to whom, the question I most found myself asking as I watched these newsclips was this:
“Who gives a fuck what college kids think?”
For the record, I am anti-Netanyahu and I am anti-Hamas. I am strictly anti-death, which is why I support any demonstrations trying to halt it. I also firmly believe that anti-Semitic violence, on campus and off, ought to be handled appropriately, say with a baseball bat or a large mallet, and that no student or group should ever be made to feel fear. But the salient fact about college age children (as Vonnegut referred to those of that age sent to die in war) is that their brains simply aren’t done.
As the National Institute for Mental Health puts it in layman’s terms, “The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”
In even laymannier terms, they’re literally half-baked.
Their batter is sticking to the toothpick.
Their emotional testicles have not yet descended.
My son attends a prestigious university, and I love him dearly. He is an exceptional human being, and I admire his sharp intelligence and fiery passions. But I’m not looking to him for answers just yet about complex issues, as I know that what he believes on Monday, he may well condemn on Tuesday (and believe again on Wednesday). I certainly did when I was his age, and I suspect you did, too. Because whether these college students are annoying or not (and other than my son, they are), they’re supposed to be doing what they’re doing.
They’re supposed to be certain they’re right.
They’re supposed to make snap decisions and change them a week later.
They’re supposed to regurgitate the words of their academically inbred professors without question and then claim to be free thinkers.
That’s as it should be.
Because they are half-baked.
They are not quite done.
The edges are crispy, but the center is raw.
And so watching these media stories, I began to get an uncomfortable feeling, a feeling that I was participating in a terrible exploitation, the exploitation of half-baked children: by the parasitic media of the IAC, who will wrap the foulest turd in the First Amendment and claim they are heroes for doing it; by the ADL, who wouldn’t know what to do without anti-Semitism; by Michael Moore, trying to stay relevant to a generation that has never heard of him; by the cowards of PEN, the same disgraces who took offense when their organization honored the comedy writers of Charlie Hebdo murdered by batshit crazy fundamentalists. “Authors in search of character,” Salman Rushdie called them at the time, Salman being one of the few writers with a spine.
This, then, is not a criticism of college students. It is a criticism of the people using them and manipulating them, of the media who should know better; of the people training cameras on them, enflaming them with their hot lights and mics and location vans for no greater goal than getting clicks. One can almost feel the reporters’ orgasms building as they report from 116th Street by Columbia, or outside the gates of Yale, or across the street from my son’s university, fixing their hair for the camera whose dead gaze makes them feel something like love; hoping, begging for the police to show up, oh yes, just like that, for the National Guard, please, yes, keep doing that, for that climactic moment they have been so desperate for, that sweet release when riot gear is strapped on, arrests are made, and they achieve… content.
“Oh God,” they pant when it’s over, “that was so good. Did you get a shot of that one guy out of thousands chanting, ‘Jews, go back to Poland?’”
They did.
I know because I was sent it.
Over and over.
Yesterday I received an email from my son’s college, informing me that a protest encampment had been formed on the campus, but that they were taking all necessary security precautions, and that no hatred or violence would be permitted. Concerned, I consulted the IAC. Some said it was a riot. Some said it was nothing. Unable to trust anyone else, I texted my son.
“Everything okay?” I asked, informing him of the email I had received.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of jews left campus last night I think? but I saw the encampments and its not a violent thing.”
“Fear,” I said.
“A lot of jews IN the encampment too tho so…” he wrote.
And then, summing it all up in a way no media parasite would ever dare, he wrote:
“Hard to fear a protest when you can see them DoorDashing food.”
So which is it?
Uber Alles or Uber Eats?
I still don’t know.
What I do know is that the half-baked students aren’t the problem. The adults exploiting them are.
Shalom Auslander is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and scriptwriter. He writes The Fetal Position on Substack, and his new memoir, FEH, will be available in July.
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There's a luxury belief if I ever heard one. Nothing to see here. Move along. Just college students. LOL. Get out of here. The college protests aren't organic. They're staged by nihilists. I've experienced the same nihilists here in Seattle. They go by the name of "Mutual Aid" in their quest to protect drug addiction and homelessness as an illustration for their point. They're anti-capitalist, anti-western society, and antisemitic. They use the homeless here as human shields to make their point. Same thing on campus. They're using the students as human shields to push their agenda. They're not anti-war. They're anti-American. I think if these students were in majors that actually require study, we'd have less of a problem.
This piece is so great. A few days ago, I made a deliberate decision and reframed my perspective on all these campus protests, pretty much for the reasons laid out here. But I would add one important point - we should all remember that, for instance, there are 8800 undergrads at Columbia, and maybe 200 protestors on the lawn. Where are the other 8600 undergrads? Living their lives, I assume. Not only is the media pouring an intense focus on the college students, but those college students are a very small minority of all college students. It's important to keep in mind. I get it - the media loves conflict, drama, etc. Anyway, I love this essay.