Oh, to Teach!
The professor looked to the back of the lecture hall. Past hundreds of glazed eyes with laptop-glowed faces and a handful of bright, eager eyes stood one man with his left oxford shoe jacked against the wall. He had a stern look on his face. The professor looked over her shoulder. The projector screen showed an image of a dead man with a mangled foot on the side of the road next to a bicycle. All around the dead man was concrete debris.
The professor cleared her throat and ignored the man in the back. She looked around at the youth before her. Overwhelming youth. Naive and foolish youth. Youth that could be enlisted and packed away at a moment's notice.
“It may seem strange,” the professor said. “To see images like this today in a place like Europe. You may think these war zones were only in the global South. And while I don’t mean to diminish the humanity of those conflicts, we are seeing history repeat itself.”
She advanced the slide and began showing parades of ‘30s Nazis in stately European cities. There were images of civilian deaths in black and white, flashing across the projector. She started to quicken the pace of the slides. The Nazis faded away and were replaced by soldiers beating someone against a wall. Starved children. Starved families. Then a picture of a dog dragging a body in color through some rubble. Rockets soaring through the sky.
“War, for the U.S., feels so distant,” she said. The slideshow continued to show blocky, modern tanks rolling through streets under perpetually gray skies. Uniformed soldiers with Russian Federation patches on their arms. “We think it happens mostly in unstable countries. This could not be farther from the truth.”
The man at the back of the class coughed. The professor looked up from her students and tried to make eye contact with the man in the back. She held his gaze. She quickened the pace of the grizzly, mutilated bodies on the slideshow.
“History is repeating itself,” she said. “And here most of you are…shopping, working on another assignment, checked out. Because this reality sucks. That history repeats itself sucks. But the more we wait the worse it gets. The more you choose to disconnect, the oppressor wins.”
Another cough came from the back of the lecture hall, followed by a loud, deep voice with a slight twang to it that reverberated and echoed through the chamber.
“Professor, are you suggesting we go to war?”
“I’m suggesting that if we engage in a policy of concessions with the Russian Federation, we will see a repeat of a large-scale conflict not seen since the 1940s.”
“World War two.”
“Yes.”
“And as a liberal arts teacher at this institution, are you suggesting that these students can do something”
“Yes.”
“And what would that be?”
“It is for them to decide.”
“What are you teaching, professor?”
“That this is not a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”
“What is it?”
“A fight for all of our freedoms.”
