I Was Once an Unknowing Idealistic Kid Who Thought I Had 'It' All Figured Out

America's 'pro-Gaza' kids need to gently pull their heads out of their asses and realize that voting for Trump is worse than voting for Harris.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

I am a cultural warrior. When I was an undergraduate student at Rutgers College in New Jersey, I took an amazing class with a professor whose name was, quite aptly, Dr. Strange. Standing six feet tall and weighing around 200, she had fiery red hair and a loud, table-rattling laugh. Dr. Strange introduced me to cultural anthropology. 

Dr. Strange loved my observations and the work I did. That inspired me more, and I fell in love with the notion of becoming a cultural anthropologist. But there was only one major problem. I became too involved with the subjects of my studies. It would be as if Jane stripped off her clothes and squatted behind the alpha male gorilla to pick bugs off his back. Each culture I began to study quickly pulled me in, making me, in many ways, “one of them.”

This is the problem I have with these kids today who are threatening not to vote for Kamala Harris because Israeli has been viciously killing residents of Gaza. Most of the misinformed kids no absolutely nothing about Gazan culture or the overall conflict at hand. They wear those Palestinian scarves and seemingly tie them too tight, which makes them feel as if they are suffocating under the weight of the injustice of “it” all. 

I get it. It breaks my heart to see so many children orphaned by the nearly-genocidal hatred hard-right Israelis in the government feel toward the Palestinians. The thing is, if October 7th, 2023, hadn’t happened, then there is a good chance Israel wouldn’t have started bombing Gaza. That said, the living conditions in Gaza were bad, but the ruling party, Hamas, could have done a lot to improve life for the citizens of Gaza. It did very little and instead focused on fomenting a desire to destroy the Israel state — a goal as realistic as Ukraine taking over Russia. 

When I was a young private in the army, and before I met Dr. Strange and fell for cultural anthropology, I recall arguing with a college-educated guy during a break from Russian classes one morning at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He was going on about how wrong it was that the U.S. treated South and Central America as if they were part of our country. I recall the next moment as if it happened yesterday because it still embarrasses me how dopey I must have sounded:

“Kevin, we can’t allow for communism to take root in our backyard. If Nicaragua wants to become communist, then we need to support whoever is willing to crush those commies.”

Kevin argued that we have no right to determine the politics of other countries and that it was their choice to choose the form of government. Another sergeant approached, a man who undoubtedly became a Trumpist years later, and the two of us worked on Kevin. Kevin never budged. I was not a fan of Reagan by any means, and I liked Gephardt, Biden, and Gore for the nomination in the next election. Still, the issue of communism in “our backyard” was firing me up to consider looking at a Republican in 1988.

Thankfully, I sat down and caught my breath. I, as I like to say, pulled my head out of my ass and realized that what was going on in Nicaragua and other Central American countries had almost nothing to do with the reality of our American life. I became more focused on racism and feminism — I had a minor in political feminist theory at Rutgers — and was slowly taking up the fight against climate change. I realized that if America was extreme and misinformed, then the rest of the world would be affected.

By 1990, I had lived in Switzerland as an exchange student and would soon head to the Soviet Union for my first extended study program. The effects of America’s domestic political scene greatly influence how the world develops. Trumpism has bred right-wingism in countries all over the world and turned Putin into a counter-culture Paul Revere. America’s refusal to combat climate change and accept that dirty fuels are killing the earth permitted the rest of the world to avoid taking on the fight. Why should little Portugal fight climate change when the biggest (now second) polluter is ignoring it? (Portugal is on the brink of being carbon neutral.)

As I set off for Russia and traveled the world, I fell in love with the cultural nuances of community after community and country after country. I learned that no single problem is ever as it seems and that everything is an interlocking jigsaw puzzle. We can dump the box on the table and slide the pieces around endlessly and haphazardly for hours, but once we start putting the puzzle together, each piece needs to interlock with the next to attain a clear understanding of our picture. The kids so “in love” with Gaza are right to mourn the deaths of so many innocents and right to demand the U.S. limit arming Israel — or at least put conditions on the support — but casting votes for Donald Trump or refusing to vote for Kamala Harris because she didn’t say that Israel is a fascist state, is culturally ignorant and ridiculous.

One 26-year-old from California, in a recent New York Times article, had this to say:

She made it clear that her stance on the Israel-Palestinian conflict will not be different from Biden’s. More empty words about hoping the war ends but not willing to stop arming Israel for actual change. With that being one of my dealbreakers, it made me less likely to vote for her (Why Some Young, Undecided Voters Changed Their Minds).

As students return now to college campuses around the country, pro-Gaza protests are breaking out. 

A crowd of about 150 student protestors at Cornell University marched into a campus dining hall Monday, the first day of classes, where speakers renewed the call for the university to divest from any institutions supplying weapons and support to the Israeli military in the war against Hamas, among a set of other demands first released earlier this year.

Twenty minutes into the rally, seven university police officers entered the atrium of Klarman Hall and stood guard near the protestors. At the instruction of lead organizers, students joined arms to form a chain in order to resist interactions with police (Cornell Students Reignite Protests).

Protesting is great. It is an act that strengthens a democracy — similar to going to the gym for strength training. I have nothing against protests. I am always against ignorance, crowd-think, and naivete. It has taken me years of traveling, learning five languages, and meeting and talking with people through those travels since 1984 to arrive at a high level of confidence when I say that I understand this world. 

The one rule I live by is that nothing is ever the way it seems; no one in power can ever be supported wholeheartedly with eyes closed, and that is why the most important thing is to ensure that the innocent don’t suffer. In the case of Gaza, innocent children are dying in droves. Maybe their families are guilty of keeping them in harm’s way, but that doesn’t change things — they are still dying. That has to stop. 

Then, we must accept that Hamas is a criminal terrorist organization and Benjamin Netanyahu should be tried for crimes against humanity. In the meantime, vote Blue.