The Grown-Ups Are Here To Kill You

Real mature.

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The Grown-Ups Are Here To Kill You

A friend of mine was on a panel at a conference recently and right before she got up in front of the audience she told another woman on the panel that she was afraid that she would not say the right things, that she would not make sense.

The woman she confided in had lived through the Rwandan genocide, a hundred-day period in 1994 where the Hutus killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis. She told my friend not to worry. “It’s Ok to not make sense during a genocide,” she said.

I am not afraid of not making sense because what could matter less: Conservative estimates of the number of deaths in Gaza are in the mid 30,000s, the number of injured is in the 80,000s, including 1000 children who have lost limbs. One of them is in a video I saw on Twitter, screaming that she wanted her legs back. I wrote that and I broke into sobs, not because I am an amazing person, but because I am a person.

Meanwhile, Pamela Paul, whose idea of foreplay as a young woman was letting Bret Stephens make her cry, and who works as a columnist for the New York Times, not because she is smart or good at writing or indeed good at anything except putting on black eyeliner and neglecting to smudge the harsh edge of it with the handy built-in tip, published a piece this morning headlined: “At Columbia, the Grown-Ups in the Room Take a Stand.” In this clearly dashed-off snippet of necrophiliac scolding, Paul praises the president of Columbia for calling the cops on protesters, who she complains were “wearing virtue signaling masks.” I guess Paul has never heard of surveillance or COVID. I guess a drone has never flown over her house playing the message “Hey, Pamela! You know there’s a little sponge on the end of your eyeliner, right?” before blowing her to smithereens.

I think we can all agree with Paul here, there is only one reason anyone would possibly want to stop the slaughter and starvation of thousands of people: They want to look like a good person. Those students must be so ashamed of their perfectly reasonable reactions to watching, in real time, an entire population wiped off the face of the earth while their murderers are planning to build beach homes where newly dead people very recently lived and swam and strolled and drank coffee. If you have heard about the beachfront property sales and are still like “This conflict is so hard to understand,” do you wonder if your heart is made from iPhone cords and an old hot water bottle? Do you wonder if you have a huge crush on Pamela Paul and are willing to give up any shred of discernment, because otherwise she might not like you? Is it possible that you, like thousands of Palestinians, are also dead?

What is a grown-up, when it comes to Israel? Well, a grown up isn’t supposed to protest a war that their own government pays for with their own tax dollars. They’re definitely not supposed to make other grown-ups miss work because they blocked traffic. Grown-ups talk about “ancient conflicts” that no one can possibly comprehend, other than Pamela Paul, who went to the only Ivy League school where people are remotely fashionable and somehow never learned how to put on eyeliner. Grown-ups blame Netanyahu, and while it’s true he is a murderer, Yitzhak Rabin, back in 1988, was the one who ordered Israeli soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinians. Golda Meir is the one who said, in 1973, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” And it was David Ben-Gurion who said, in 1946, "We must expel Arabs and take their places...and, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places-then we have force at our disposal." 

Netanyahu is just the guy in charge as the slow genocide that Israel has been working on since the 1940s found the momentum and then the moment to go into its final phase. That’s it. If it weren’t him, it would be someone else. If you don’t understand this then do you also think Boomers have more money than Gen Z because they work harder? If Netanyahu died tomorrow, he would be replaced by someone worse.

Here is the last bit of Paul’s little essay: “Thursday, with the authority at her disposal and with the courage that too many academic leaders have lacked, [Columbia president] Shafik did what any responsible adult should do in her position: She ordered the police to clear Columbia’s campus of the students seemingly unaware of how lucky they are to attend one of the nation’s top universities.”

Lucky? I mean, yes, obviously, in the sense that they’re in a privileged position in the world. They do not live in the mud, they are not being bombed, they are not hungry. On the other hand, is anyone who lives inside of a complete farce lucky? Now, it’s likely that these students got some of their ideas about this war being wrong from their classes. In arresting and expelling them, Columbia is letting them know that this knowledge is not to be applied. It is only content that they have purchased so they can “be educated,” which is about being able to endlessly Argue About What Yasser Arafat Did While People Die. 

I don’t blame anyone for going to college, in the sense that I don't blame anyone for working either. College is a tool for survival. As Americans, we survive by managing our relationship to killing. College is where we are trained to kill, not with weapons but with industry and investment, or where we are trained to ignore killers — military, police, polluters, etc. — and increasingly trained to fear standing up to them.

Columbia facilitated the arrest of these kids. It sent them emails telling them they had 15 minutes to get what they needed from their rooms and offered them help from a “CARES responder.” And a lot of them went right back out there.

Pamela Paul wants these students to be afraid of the administration and cops. She thinks it’s good for them. You can hear the snideness on the page, the resentment that these students refuse to step out of the way so the killing can go on.

These students know they have something that Columbia, with its named chairs, its status as the largest private landowner in New York City and its $13.6 billion endowment can’t offer them, and that is the feeling that comes from recognizing that your own freedom and survival is tied up with that of every person in the world. It can be a scary thing to accept. But nothing is scarier than trying to convince yourself that the key to staying safe and to getting what you need is to never piss off the guys who can hurt you. 

It is normal to fight to keep other people, even people you don’t know, from dying. It is not childish or simple to decide between right and wrong. Being an adult and not worrying about killing are not the same thing, but there will always be someone trying to tell you they are.

I hope this made sense, but if it didn’t, we know why.