Column: Lux and Libertas and still wanting more
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.
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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.
As I swiped through my Snapchat feed one day this February, the photos of people navigating the streets of New Orleans alongside those cooped up studying for midterms suddenly gave way to an old photo of a black-and-white cutout from Duke University’s student newspaper.
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. Strangely enough, after deciding to leave the library, I found myself right back up on the sixth floor of Davis. Mentally checking off the dewey decimal numbers of books I would never be tested on, I found a copy of the first volume of poetry I ever read cover-to-cover.
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. He leaned over and asked where I was headed, and the daughter sent me a kind smile. The seats around me were filled with silence; our voices boomed around the back of the plane.
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. Following this quip, he chuckled and then sort of stopped himself: “Actually, I guess, you should be careful.”
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.
On Friday, I headed to Donald Trump’s rally in Greensboro. I still can’t quite nail down what, exactly, I expected to find. Perhaps a half-full amphitheater of men?
“The price of freedom.”
Sometimes it can seem that public empathy can go farther — can almost make more sense projected into social media, dissected in op-eds — than even the most personal, private grief.
This weekend, I took advantage of the new-semester lull — or, probably more accurately, the calm before the storm — to explore some towns around Chapel Hill.
“I think some of us, particularly myself, did not understand the implications of what (House Bill 2) would do.”
“No, don’t tell me that’s not what you really think in America. I read your media.”