Mr. or Ms. President of any and every college. The facts over there, in Gaza, are on display to see. The facts over there are bellowing visibly and even bragging openly their intent lest anyone meant to run doesn’t hear their message. Leave or die! The sky is weeping bloody tears. Do you see the drops? Can you feel them on your skin? 

From beneath the rubble a moan echoes. At the intersection of brains and bullets bodies crumple and burn. Colleges over there become dust. Hospitals over there melt into their own toilet drains. Mr. or Ms. President are you so sheltered in your fancy clothes and so bunkered behind your polished doors that all the carnage is nothing to you? As it was nothing to your presidential predecessors, and to their’s? In the home of the brave, land of the free?

Over there people flee to destinations where they huddle for a moment and then they flee again—and again. Stomachs over there curdle hunger. Parched lips over there crave water, even just water. Meanwhile food festers. Water goes rancid. Our bombs burst in their air. Our bombs, star spangled, death waving. Mr. or Ms. President can you see all that over there? Can you hear all that over there? 

When there is some outrage by a few who are called Hamas you rightly weep for its civilian victims. You cry terror and indeed it is terror. So in your mangled minds you do know what terror is. You loudly scream stop the carnage. And quite quickly it stops. You then silently scream for vengeance. When systematic massacre follows for months on end to demolish life and means of life by way of an army named defense and for a country named Israel that is in turn supported by your country and to whom you have ties that are sealed in corporate commercial contracts, your actions say go, go, go. Suddenly killing civilians is not terror.

One student on your campus—and it is your campus only because you are its fund raiser and despite that you teach and you learn nothing—complains to someone, somewhere, of feeling uncomfortable, of being inconvenienced. Your ears perk up. They open wide. They reverberate. You then commiserate. You feel outrage at the assault on education that the student’s discomfort conveys to you. Your eyes focus. You rear up to act. Police on parade.

Later another student says my family is incinerated and my college is connected to the incinerator from over here to over there, and I am aghast. You smile, your ears close, and you slumber on. Do your eyes and ears have filters? Or is it just that your donors, your fellow abettors of mayhem manifested in every direction threaten you with reprisals if you see or hear what is actually exploding over there and what is over here forged into your budget projections? Egad, my job!

Mr. or Ms. President of any college, is it simply that you really don’t care about us over there or about most of us over here? Are you simply monstrous? Or is that you are human but you have learned perhaps from your own college molding way back when to turn off your caring when it might create problems because you are a well trained coward over here?

Is there even one of you, even just one Mr. or Ms. College President anywhere in the courtyards and fields of academia whose eyes and ears still work? Whose compassion still exists? Whose sense of justice isn’t filtered? Or are each and every one of you without reason, exiled from logic, twisted into the opposite of humane—and along the way made pathetically cowardly? Could it be that students should redefine their schools so they themselves won’t be bent out of shape by society’s pliers and will instead be helped to see, hear, feel, and affect what is really going on over there and also over here?

Not only are students who stand up to genocide correct and courageous, could it be that their administrations are so wrong that they are the ones who should be suspended, expelled, or at the very least retired from ruling what they don’t even understand much less believe in? 

Could it be that in addition to calling for their campuses to divest and join the worldwide calls for ceasefire, students in motion should be assessing who really ought to be making policy that affects them, affects their families, and affects their fellow humans over here and over there?

Dear Mr. or Ms. President, can you even comprehend such thoughts or do your filters censor them with all the attentiveness and concern that they deny to your visible choices?

And students, please carry on!

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