Park School

To talk about the war today, I'm going to talk about a local story taking place at a school I didn't go to.

And we begin by talking about its location.

If Park School's location didn't exist you couldn't make it up. It exists at the border of two very particular realities: right where Old Court Road meets Falls Road. Drive just a block down Old Court Road and you get to Pikesville - Jewish Baltimore, where something like 90,000 Jews are said to live in a 5ish mile radius. Turn onto Falls Road in either direction and you get to goysiher Baltimore - not just goyim as in non-Jews, but goyim as a very particular subspecies of white person: upper middle class WASPS and Anglo- Catholics, and of a more recent vintage, Irish and Italians and Germans who want to live like WASPS. By now, this definition of goyim has grown so broad that it comprises people of color who like WASPy ways, and even Jews who marry out.

Park has always been the place for Jews who didn't want to Jewish, and goyim who didn't want to be goyish. Miserable at my first high school, I wanted to go to Park School for my second half. Park was the kind of progressive school where creative, individualistic, different drummer kids went, and a full third of those kids were Jewish. It was a school for Pikesville Jews who wanted to be defined more as liberals and universalists than as Jews - and therefore a place many Jews-with-a-capital-J looked at with extreme suspicion. In their minds, Jewish families sent kids to Park as a means to betray their Jewish heritage; but it should have been clear years before that that I badly needed a school like that.

It was too late for me to turn that ship around for a hundred reasons - principal among them being I was a bad student: learning disabled and emotionally discombobulated, I applied and didn't get in. The admissions director commented from my essay that I'd be one of the school's best writers, but one of my own teachers recommended I not be accepted in their recommendation letter. Another friend of mine transferred at the same time and he got in. He didn't even tell me he was applying. I remember going to his graduation party two years later, feeling completely dejected among all these high achieving kids who were about to go to the best liberal arts colleges in the country: places like Swarthmore, Williams, Bates, Mount Holyoke, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, to say nothing of the Ivies...

I don't know if Park School is a place that sees the world with any sense of reality, but I'm certain Park School's reality would be quite nicer for me.

A quarter century later, Park is grabbing local headlines. To show you what's happening, I'm going to reprint part of the story here as reported in the Baltimore Banner (please, everybody subscribe to it):

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"Students at The Park School of Baltimore were five minutes into a Zoom call with two Swarthmore College professors on Friday when the screen went black. School leadership had shut down the internet.

The video call was an attempt by some students to take matters into their own hands when school leaders abruptly canceled an assembly on the war in Israel and Gaza. Angry with the decision, student government members contacted the professors who’d been scheduled to speak — Sa’ed Atshan, a Palestinian, and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a Jewish Israeli citizen — and announced in a schoolwide email that the talk was on.

The school’s leadership wasn’t having it.

The Park School is the latest local institution where passionate discourse about the conflict in the Middle East has turned to controversy.

Students walked off campus in protest of the school’s recent action, with the support of “many” faculty, Paradis wrote to the school community Sunday.

“While the students’ goals and rationale — and indeed their commitment to advocating for what they believe they and their fellow students were ready to experience — were clearly articulated, their actions countermanded my cancellation message of the previous day,” Headmaster Paradis wrote.

The originally scheduled talk had been canceled because the speakers “express views and use rhetoric that are not in keeping with what we understood to be their planned program,” Paradis wrote in a Thursday email explaining the decision. He said he wants students to be engaged in difficult conversations but added, “We must find ways to do so that yield constructive, not corrosive or harmful, dialogue.”

Atshan and Rothman-Zecher had been scheduled to speak in person to the campus’s Upper School, or high school, at 9:45 a.m. Friday. But the school emailed the two on Thursday afternoon informing them that the event was canceled, Rothman-Zecher said, telling them “some of your rhetoric does not align with what our community currently needs.”

The email singled out Atshan in particular, but did not make it clear what rhetoric of his was deemed objectionable.

Atshan is an associate professor and chair of the peace and conflict studies department at Swarthmore . Rothman-Zecher is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing and novelist who teaches creative writing at Swarthmore, a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia.

They have similar viewpoints, Rothman-Zecher said. Both are queer pacifists who oppose the war in Gaza and the occupation and believe “that everyone is deserving of justice and freedom.” They were never invited to debate each other at The Park School, he said.

“It was a space of openness and curiosity and not a space of pushing in a uniform perspective,” he said. “I was looking forward to speaking with the students [at Park] about the role I see for art and literature in broadening our minds,” he said. “I am still looking forward to that.""

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I have no idea what the aforementioned 'rhetoric' would have been, though one can guess they'd freely use words like 'genocide', 'apartheid', 'imperialism' and 'settler-colonialism.' I also imagine that had a speaker from the Israeli embassy come to Park School they would be escorted off the premises before they got past that weird mansion you see from Old Court Road.

I'm sure there are pro-Israel parents and alumni at Park who threatened to withdraw their donations, and I'm sure there are pro-Israel students who feel completely isolated right now. No private school's administration is so stupid that they don't know on which side the bread is buttered; and if firing over an Israel issue can happen to an Ivy League president, it can certainly happen to high school administrators. But Park is the sort of place that creates radicals and the cutting edge. The very fact that being anti-Israel's actions is subversive enough to create an event like this will make the cause all the more appealing to students.

I also have little doubt at that as a 17-year-old Park student I would have lead that walkout and happily given my parents a coronary. It wasn't because of my vast comprehension of foreign affairs and statecraft when I was 17. It's because was utterly fed up with the parochialism of Jewish Baltimore, which I saw as an impediment to my being able to lead a quality life. Like so many 17 year olds, I was going crazy with understanding what seemed beyond my elders: not understanding of politics, understanding how we were all dying a little from the rigidity of a religious upbringing.

The heavy burdens of my youth are a quarter-century ago. I'm almost 42 now, and I don't put as much premium on quality of life anymore, but I'm still fed up with Pikesville's bullshit. I retain a small measure of contempt for the rigidity my community of origin espouses. My life alone doesn't mean much, but there is a direct line between that rigidity and the gathering authoritarian storm that threatens us all.

Correspondingly, there's a line between that rigidity and the opposition to it. Both have authoritarian roots. The latter sympathizes with Hamas in all but name, the former sympathizes in all but name with Putin. None of them may realize it, but that is the result of their beliefs. It's all the same desire to simplify life to the point that whole classes of people are the enemy. That's not the truth. The truth is that the world is made up of billions of complicated people doing the best they can in the face of sociopaths telling them that the world has billions of villains rather than thousands.

So even if politics is a lot more complicated than I realized, having sympathy for people who are different than you is complicated too, and few people are better at simplifying their eccentrics into non-persons than Jews in Baltimore.

But this is about Park, not Pikesville's bullshit. Every city in America has a Park School: a school for the kids of upper-middle class parents who think that unlike them, their kids should be free to minimize life's bullshit and not compromise their personalities or interests for life's demands. Hell, most cities in America have two of them, because while I didn't get into Park, I got waitlisted at Friends.

But inevitably, with the minimizing of bullshit comes the belief that life can and should be free of bullshit. Should it be free? I'm sure that's true, we're all sure that's true. Can it be free? Come on, we all should know better by now. Life itself is bullshit. It's bills to pay and bosses to assuage, children to entertain and parents to appease. Getting rid of capitalism won't change that, neither will getting rid of government, neither will getting rid of religion, neither will sweeping science's findings under the rug. 98% of life is the process of what we have to do to keep life going, and if you spend your time contemplating life rather than doing what's expected of you, you go far more crazy than you would if you just spent your life fulfilling your responsibilities.

This surfeit of opportunities, this conviction that life does not mean to insult us, this belief that life is something better than one foot in front of the other in a world that roots for our failure, is precisely what leads to life being exactly that. Accept that the world sucks, we can make the world somewhat better, shake your fist at the world and tell it that it's not good enough, the world gets much, much worse.

20th century Europe was littered with the verbiage of intelligentsia who supported totalitarian regimes because they promised utopia against all evidence that intellectuals were the first to be shot. If they were from 21st century Baltimore, the majority of them would have come from schools like Park or Friends, or magnet schools like Carver and BSA.

Don't misunderstand, these places don't produce naive radicals by coddling their students, but they do exactly what they're charged with doing: they protect their students from knowing just how bad the world has it, and therefore when they develop some vague idea of how bad the world is, they think a transformative solution will make it better rather than worse. And in thinking so, a disproportionate number their students fall into ideologies that root for totalitarians as much as any fundamentalist Christian education would.

Schools for quirky kids like Park, and the quirky liberal arts colleges they feed into, lead to better lives for their students where smart kids can grow up to be innocent of the mendacious ways of the world. I would have paid any price, born any burden, to live in that kind of innocence, and I'm painfully jealous of the hundreds of millions worldwide who have it.

But that freedom comes at a price for the rest: the world these people think they fight for doesn't exist. They go off to college ready to embrace anticolonialism and radical critical theory, not realizing that the organizations they advocate for would throw them into prison the moment they achieve power, then throw the rest of us too.

Gaza is not the USSR under Stalin. Russia is the world's largest country, whereas Hamas controls one of the world's smallest, but had Hamas a territory as big as the USSR, they'd be just as murderous as Stalin ever was. There is no civil rights struggle in Gaza until Hamas is gone and Fatah is reconstituted from the ground up. Until then, the only hope is Israel's success. Their quarrel is not against Israel, their fight is against Netanyahu and Likud, but so long as they're encouraged to mouth half-quotes from cultish radical theorists whose entire theories exist to be brainwashing, the world of the Left will continue to fight the wrong fight, and the triumph of the Right is a foregone conclusion: be that Right Christian, Islamic, or Jewish.

Unless the left keeps allying with the same causes as Hamas. So if you win, good luck enacting your agenda with those allies.