Opinion/Brown: An open letter to college students

I graduated from college in 1968. In the spring of my senior year, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death, and then Bobby Kennedy. Kids my age were protesting the Vietnam War — and also dying in it. But the percentage of students who got involved in politics was probably not that different from what it is today. The media acted as if all college students were spoiled hippies, protesters, hated America. In other words, not that much has changed between now and then. My generation was just born sooner, that's all.

I've been a teacher all my adult life… 45 years… so I've grown old while you've grown up — and all this time, I've loved you with all my heart.

It's not exactly the unrest at college that worries me today. But the nature of it suggests a massive failure of love. This is not your fault. You have grown up in a culture increasingly tribalized and polarized. It's taken talk radio and social media decades to bring our country to this point.

When I was your age, a lot of us believed that history had come to a pivot point when it might be possible to reinvent society for the better. It felt so possible we could taste it. We imagined an America where capital served conscience… where the barriers of race and gender and faith could dissolve and we could live together as one people.

We dreamed of a world where imperialism could be replaced by mutual cooperation and goodwill. But the world is so vast, its powers and institutions so entrenched, that it is infinitely harder to move it than we had ever imagined.

Here's the part that breaks my heart the most, and I hate to say that you have a part in it. I fear that liberalism has lost its way and what we have today is not a competition between heroes and villains - as folks on both sides would like to imagine - but a contest between two deeply flawed systems.

Liberalism has failed in a fundamental way, and that means some of your professors, for all their idealism, and you with all of yours, may be failing too.

The conservative movement has become a reaction against modernity in all its forms. Its goal is to repeal the '60s and most of what's happened in the half-century since. Consequently, conservatives hate us for changing the nature of the country they have loved and lived in all these years.

Liberalism and the progressive movement are fundamentally based on the idea of universal love. Liberals wrapped their arms around racial, sexual, and religious minorities. The whole idea of liberal democracy was to temper majority rule with an aggressive protection of minorities of all sorts. But in the process, liberals lost affection and respect for the people with whom they disagreed. And this is key.

It isn't easy - and nobody said it would be - but if the fundamental principle of universal love is to animate what we do, then we can't withhold our love from anyone. Martin Luther King told us that you can't free the slave without freeing the slave master. This is the level of compassion that liberalism requires. If we degenerate into two social and political factions detesting each other, determined to thwart each other's plans and realize each other's fears, then we have lost our souls.

Israel's Netanyahu points out that the United States bombed civilian targets in World War II. God knows, we lost a lot of blood in Vietnam, but we also killed a million Vietnamese. This hardly leaves us in a position to preach. But you are a new generation, and you have the right to create moral standards and challenge us to live by them.

Please remember that Hamas has also made its plans for victory, making lists of Israelis to kill, of institutions to crush… lacking only the power to carry them through. This has always been the moral ambiguity facing your generation and mine.

The central problem facing us today is a colossal failure of love. “Again, I observed all the oppression that takes place under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed, with no one to comfort them. The oppressors have great power, and their victims are helpless.” King Solomon of Israel wrote this almost 3,000 years ago, and he was Jewish. All these years, and nothing has changed.

So if nothing will change, we will have to. Your Jewish classmates do not sit in the Israeli Knesset. Your pro-Palestinian classmates are not Hamas. We shouldn't hate each other. We should hate it, this thing we do and can't stop doing. Our failures are so deep and endemic, we would rather fight and kill each other than address them. This is what we have to change. Love can’t be based on attraction; it has to be based on policy, a moral imperative, a spiritual discipline.

A few days ago, I was waiting in line at the hospital pharmacy to pick up my chemo. Ahead of me, a little boy was standing, his head happily buried in his mother's lap, her gentle hands tangled in his hair. Suddenly for no discernible reason, he turned around, ran over and threw his arms around my waist. He didn't know I was a frightened old man, sick with cancer. He just did it. Free-floating love offered without prejudice. If he can do it, so can we. Universal love has not tried and failed. We have failed because we have not loved hard enough or anywhere near long enough. Please, I beg you, do not renew this failure for another generation.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@ gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Liberals lost affection for those with whom they disagree