Have you ever really listened to campus at night? If I could tug its sounds down from the Polk Place air, I bet I could show you why I do.
Scouting the room for fellow civilians among a sea of naval uniforms, I spotted a table in the back of the mess hall that was dotted with both and took a seat.
“Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with the animal that suffers.”
After a long day of thesis writing and a relentlessly chaotic news cycle, I resolved to shut my books for the evening.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column asking: In politics, who really are our neighbors? I meant for the piece to play on that perennial impulse, the command to love thy neighbor as yourself. Now I ask: Who are our strangers?
I clumsily settled into an aisle seat on my flight back from Austin, Texas to Chapel Hill last week, next to a middle-aged man and his daughter.
I recently read a piece in The New York Times on the Syrian resettlement in the United States. The piece followed a family from their time as refugees in Jordan to resettlement in Illinois.
“You’re probably on a list somewhere,” joked a law student I met last week who was campaigning for a local candidate. After chatting with me about my postgraduate plans and my writing, he expressed faux concern for my ability to write opinion columns openly if Donald Trump was elected president.
I grew up fascinated by the field of international relations. An avid follower of politics in a politically divided household, I could count on international politics as a much easier place (certainly compared to Texan politics!) to find common ground.
