Thank you, Petra

It's late, and I can't sleep. I'm too anxious, waiting for tomorrow morning when I can finally walk down to the local synagogue (my polling place) and cast my ballot--well, lock in my choices on the touch screen. I guess some people (very few at this point) might think that this election is just like any other, more of the same. But I think we all know that's not true. I can't help but feel that change in the air that Obama has been talking about for so long now. You can try to chalk it up to more empty words and promises made by politicians, but we know this year, this election, is different.

I asked my students today if they were planning on voting. Every single one of them (except one kid who's not a citizen), in both sections, raised their hand. Four years ago I asked the same in my class at the University of DE and got perhaps half of the response I did today at Rutgers. Imagine UD today, the alma mater of Joe Biden.

I've been thinking today about one special memory I have of my UD days, a class on International Ethics that I took in my senior year and one particular classmate. Petra was an incredibly intelligent (and beautiful) woman from Russia. I remember her saying such eloquent things in class discussion; I often listened to her in wonder and wished that I could articulate something even remotely as coherent as she. I looked forward to class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings just so that I could listen to her, never mind our professor: She always had the best arguments, and a better delivery. Maybe it was her accent.

What I most remember about Petra though is what she had to say one particular morning in class. In International Relations we referred most often to realists and idealists. The idealists were those people that lived in the clouds and thought that if everybody cooperated and worked together then everything would be ok and we'd have peace. The realists were the more practical ones who believed you couldn't trust anyone, every nation for itself, protect your own interests, the ends justify the means, etc. In this Ethics course we talked about the genocide in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the U.S. role in 9/11 (the first one), the coup d'état that removed Salvador Allende and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. We discussed the varying international responses to these events and would try to decide if certain interventions, or lacks of intervention had been appropriate, or ethical. Or both. Or neither.

It was October, a month after I had stumbled into class to share, with shocked disbelief, what I had just seen by chance on the Spanish news: a report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and as I watched, a second one had hit. You can imagine the tone of our class discussions in those days. Petra was increasingly frustrated by the overwhelmingly conservative stances of the students in our class, including mine I guess. At that time, if I even had a stance, it leaned in that direction.

But not Petra. And this one particular morning she couldn't take it anymore. Surely that one obnoxious kid had made some bombastic statement about how the U.S. was completely justified in its invasion of that poor little island of Grenada to fight the spread of Communism. I mean, in 1983 the Commie threat was still raging, and on top of that there were 20 U.S. medical students there that had to be protected! She snapped, but in that elegant and articulate way that only Petra could snap. And she laid out the most convincing argument for idealism that I had ever heard. I can't remember the exact words, but the idea was that we couldn't afford not to be idealists; because, well, what was a world without hope and a world without the possibility of peace? What was a world without compassion and solidarity? Pointless. Nothing. Everything else just melted away. I've never turned back.

I remembered all of this today as I reflected on this presidential election. Today I vote for idealism. Today I vote for Petra and everything she taught me to believe in.