Filling the void

Once after school, my Canadian-born first grader said: “Today in class we watched a movie about this land, where the indigenous people are gracious hosts, and all of us are unwanted guests.”
I do my best not to swear in front of the kids, so I kept listening quietly, waiting for my blood pressure to drop.
“I didn’t like the movie,” he added.
“Why,” I asked carefully, barely opening my mouth to avoid uncontrolled cursing.
“I felt guilty,” my child eagerly explained, “but I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

I used to retell this story to admire his self-awareness and wisdom. How accurately he, the six years old, captured the semantic and emotional load of the message in the movie. Years later, I understand that, focused on my maternal vanity, I overlooked a phenomenon of greater significance.

An entire generation (one and a half generations? two?) has grown up burdened with a sense of imposed guilt. The completely undeserved guilt, because, firstly, children are not responsible for their foreparents; secondly, the majority of these children’s foreparents never profited from the “terrible sins of colonialism”. Neither my foreparents, killed by pogromists and Nazis, nor even the British foreparents, most of whom in the early 20th century worked at factories for twelve or more hours a day, seven days a week, for a meager wage, with no vacations or sick leaves, and whose average life expectancy was less than forty years. They weren’t officially slaves, but they cannot be viewed as free, prosperous individuals either.

Honestly delving into history makes it obvious that everyone used to kill, enslave, and exploit everyone else. Of course, killing, enslaving, and exploiting other people is bad. That is something we know now. By the way, not everyone. Some continue killing, enslaving, and exploiting, and still get to chair committees in the UN.

Honestly delving into history makes it obvious that everyone used to kill, enslave, and exploit everyone else. The only difference is in the level of success. The Europeans had better developed science and technology, so they were quite successful. For the very same reason, the European colonizers brought with them not only death, diseases, and oppression, but also road construction, seafaring, Western medicine and education, and finally, the internet. Clearly, it's bad to impose all these blessings of civilization by fire and sword. Yet, it is substantially better than imposing jihad by fire and sword.

It is precisely in the Western world that human rights, the high value of human life, freedom of speech, and other virtues of democracy have developed. These values have become so firmly established in our society that the modern, coming-of-age generation has no understanding that freedom and peace are not the norm, and are not basic, inalienable human rights. Peace and freedom are wonderful things, but they are privileges that can be taken away at any moment. They are privileges that one must be ready to fight for.

The new generation of Western kids has grown up in peaceful times. This generation never had to fight for its rights and has had nothing to overcome; they received everything on a silver platter. They lack the imagination to envision how everything they have always had, could be lost in an instant.

It is typical for any youth to rebel, denounce the existing system, and disdain their parents and grandparents. Traditionally, this adolescent and student rebellion ends when people get married and have children.

In the past, people would bring children into the world either for the need of extra hands on the farm, by following God's commandments, due to social pressure, or simply for lack of contraceptives. In different eras and different social strata, the reasons may have varied, but the result was always the same. Children were born, and feeding and raising them required a home, a household, an income, and stability. This is called growing up, and having grown up yourself, you realize that your parents are not so dumb, and you no longer have the time or energy for rebellion.

A few previous generations grew up on the so-called American Dream: first you work hard, and then you are rewarded, and your children have a better life than you had at the start. The current generation of youth is deprived of this dream. Not because they already have it all; one can always want more. They cannot dream because of the guilt instilled in them since childhood. Everything they have is undeserved, and therefore they are guilty. The more they have, the guiltier they are. No dreams can coexist with this neurosis. There can be no motivation for hard work, if any result of this work increases your guilt.

The current generation has grown up without religion. It is ironic for a convinced atheist like myself to be writing this, but religion is not only inquisition and corruption. Religion is also about community, sense of belonging, basic spirituality, and moral guidelines. Complete elimination of religion from human lives leaves a substantial void. While some manage to fill this void with books, music, and independent spiritual work, for others it remains a gaping hole. And just like an empty stomach devours itself, the unfilled spiritual vacuum leads to the soul and the brain devouring themselves.

Religious dictatorship is when God is at the center of the universe and the sole purpose of a human is to serve God. State dictatorship is where people are obliged to sacrifice themselves to the state. Both are horrible. It is so much better to live in a free world with neither. However, raising a whole generation on absolutist freedom values leads to lack of responsibility. The sense of one's own significance, raised to the absolute, breeds hopeless infantilism.

Therefore, anti-Israel protests and encampments on campuses look like crowds of erratic, uncontrollable children throwing tantrums. Unruly, off-the-leash children, ready to tear down the entire world while the adults look the other way. The adults have abdicated. Out of laziness? Out of weakness? Out of fear of the monster they have created?

The toxic mixture — absence of meaning, loneliness, surfeit, and guilt — is the perfect ground for the modern revolutionary movement. This movement allows casting off all the burdens: there can’t be a higher purpose than fighting for all oppressed people around the world. By making the sacrifices that the struggle entails they are no longer indulged, capricious snowflakes. They are noble warriors.

But central is the guilt. Guilt by birth, a guilt for transgressions you aren’t fully aware of but are obliged to repent. Guilt that is impossible to atone for. This burden is so unbearable that one might sell their soul to the devil to be rid of it. 

The revolution points young people toward someone even guiltier than they are. The more fiercely they persecute this culprit, the more attainable and closer redemption from your own guilt.

The Anti-Israel camps are temples of a new religion: religion of the fight against Zionists. Everything they're accustomed to blaming themselves for is now projected onto the "Zionist". They imbue Zionists with the most sinful traits: white, colonizer, occupier, oppressor. The guiltier one is, the stronger they are obliged to hate the Zionist. The Jewish anti-Zionists bear a greater guilt that needs redemption, and so their hate is the most boiling. 

It's not simply a religion of hatred; it is a cult. These are sectarians' camps. This is why the access is restricted. The sectarians refuse to converse with outsiders because any question is deemed inappropriate. An uncomfortable question is desecration.

Neither the organizers nor the participants of anti-Israel protests and camps have the goal of establishing dialogue, finding compromises, and paths to reconciliation. They have devised a scale of differences to determine the order in which dissenters should be executed. They are prepared. They sit and wait for the command: attack!