Little known fact: A hundred years ago or so, Adolf Hitler was a student at Yale.
Nah, just joshin'. Klara Schicklgruber's baby boy never set foot in the United States. This is just clipart from a collection of same from the 1910s through 1920s, when no one had heard of Adolf (and what a blissful state that is in retrospect). Back then so-called normal men might sport that whiskbroom mustache that has been thrown in the same trash heap as the swastika, and good riddance.
Hitler may never have gone to Yale, but now it seems Yale and our other elite universities have come to Hitler. Yale didn't get in the same hot water as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did recently for their tolerance of ferocious antisemitism and support of terrorism, but Yale's response was meager, and now the worst offender on the faculty is in line to become the new university president.
And the Ivies wonder why normal Americans hate them?
Of course, if we all just celebrated National Brotherhood Week in our hearts and year-round, none of this would have happened.
The National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) was founded in 1927 to combat bias in America, and launched the first National Brotherhood Day in the 1930s. It was expanded to a whole week in 1936. Mostly it is remembered now for the parody by Harvard professor Tom Lehrer, as the whole concept of brotherhood had become irrelevant by the 2000s and the event no more. Because obviously we all love one another now.
No, stop laughing. If they tried to relaunch National Brotherhood Week now, it would be condemned for being sexist and patriarchal. What about sisterhood? What about non-binary personhood? What about foreign nationals? What about non-binary foreign nationals?
So, hate is humming right along these days. However, it no longer comes mostly from dumb bigots in rural America; it is much more common in the cities and in the ivy-covered halls of academia.
What will it take to make our educated class stop being so full of hate? I don't know. Maybe the Harvard guys could try to stop hating those Elis for a start. And maybe our university students could try to stop hating their university founders and all of America. Not likely, though -- those kids just LOVE to hate.
Fred, I have no idea what prompted me to search for your blog today. But here's a bit more on Brotherhood Week from Anniversaries and Holidays: A Calendar of Days and How to Observe Them Second Edition, Completely Revised (Mary E. Hazeltine and Judith K. Sollenberger, eds. American Library Association, Chicago. 1944). It always includes Washington's Birthday, and begins on the Sunday nearest the 22nd. Quoting from the national Conference, its objective is "Justice, amity, understanding, and cooperation among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews...." Maybe part of the issue at universities is that so few count themselves s members of any of those groups.
ReplyDeleteAnd why limit it to humans, why not all sentient beings. And non-sentient as well. Off earth ones too.
ReplyDeleteSure, completely dilute the message, but at least there is no one to take offense.
rbj13
And what guy who ever grew a beard or mustache and later shaved it off didn't leave that whiskbroom for a minute or two to consider from the mirror and imagine the reaction to keeping it.
ReplyDeleteActually, I believe history will ultimately recognize that western civilization is experiencing an epidemic of mental illness, triggered by ubiquitous access to social media and amplified by the bad actors who use it to manipulate the masses.
I am an optimist, I believe in the long run evolution will work to preserve and strengthen the species, as it always has.