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Healing the Social Disease of Hatred
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
- The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them;
he delivers them from all their troubles.—Psalm 34:17
Based on history alone, we shouldn’t have been surprised by the student protests at America’s elite universities. Student protests have long since become a fixture of social unrest since at least the sixties. But what made the current protests so disturbing was the vitriol condoning and accepting the slaughter of Jews. Too many Americans were not awake to the deep animus that had been shaping up long before the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the Palestinians.
What makes these protests surprising for many watching from the sidelines, is the focused hatred for the Jewish state and her people—everywhere. The protestors and their enablers will try and use language that is designed to camouflage this, somehow thinking that saying, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is “just” a political statement against Israeli colonization or occupation. What it really means is a call for the eradication of the Jewish people living in Israel. So how did it come to pass that students from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, NYU to Stanford, UCLA, even the Art Institute of Chicago! How did so many campuses from coast to coast get to be so anti-semitic and so pro Palestinian? When did college students become so blood-thirsty?
The answers have not occurred to most of us because others—maybe our neighbors—methodically created in our country, a social construct that’s giving way to a deception. A social construct is a concept that exists not in objective reality, but as a result of human interaction. It only exists because humans agree that it exists. Psychologists and social scientists study socially constructed reality to better understand how groups of people create social phenomena. 1 We shouldn’t rely on sociologists to tell what others are creating. We should be able to see it for ourselves. If we can’t, it’s because there are arguably two realms where people largely inhabit is the first realm, which includes the productive enterprise of meaningful work and career. Where the people provide for themselves and their families. This is a very big realm indeed.
But there is another realm: the one of social change, or activism, cultivated in the institutions of higher learning, community organizations, using political and judicial lawfare. These people prefer exercising control over those living in our first realm.
The sixties spawned a generation of radicals fomenting change. It was only a matter of time before sit-ins would devolve into campus insurrections.
The connection between campus protests and anti-semitism may not seem obvious, and one reason for this might be the conditioning earlier in the twentieth century by campus radicals. Most protests then would have avoided the “no-go zone” of the prior generational condemnation of anti-semitism—hatred of the Jews—still relatively fresh in the aftermath of Hitler’s atrocities in Nazi Germany. But, if time heals all wounds, it will just as easily cauterize evil acts of brutality. Eighty years ago, protestors hadn’t been taught to compare a former president to Hitler. Yet, things have changed dramatically, albeit gradually over time. What follows is but one example of how and why radicals made the trip there.
While Campaigning for Governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan (pictured) wrote a letter to Glenn Dumke, then chancellor of San Francisco State College, revealing a very critical view of the college agitator LeRoi Jones. (later Amiri Baraka) Jones was a, “radical black intellectual whose stance toward the role of African Americans within American society underwent a significant change in the early 1960s. He belonged to a generation of black authors who began to publicly advocate the use of violence in the struggle for an overall improvement of the socioeconomic status of African Americans. Heavily influenced early on by the Beat Generation and liberalism of Greenwich Village, Baraka emerged in the sixties as perhaps the most powerful literary voice of Black intellectual circles in the United States.” [https://absa.upce.cz/index.php/absa/article/view/2255/1995]
His early works, in particular, “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” and “Dutchman and The System of Dante’s Hell,” are reflections of Jones’ transformation from a mere advocate of Black culture to a militant Black Nationalist advocating a revolution against white supremacy. It is no coincidence that Jones adopted a Bantu Muslim name and presumably an adherence to this minority religion of Somali tribes. His influence in the higher echelons of the academe has been well documented.
The campus protests today are the result of a very potent and virulent form of a social and cultural “disease,” admixing Marxist classism with the bitter legacy of slavery; then morphing to colonialism, Black Nationalism, and in large measure, the naiveté of spoiled young students who have been denied a basic education in American civics and history—and then, significantly, the fanatical Muslim hatred of the “little Satan” of Israel—which leads inexorably to the hatred of the “big Satan” of America.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) made its debut over the Trayvon Martin shooting in 2012. Barak Obama said of him, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Then, in 2013, activists and friends Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi originated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin. Martin’s shooting death, completely avoidable, was the result of him beating Zimmerman until, with no other choice available, he was shot in self-defense.
And so, the “diversity” that the leftists, nee liberals are really calling for, looks like this to them. The target market for this brand of civil unrest are the disenchanted, the disillusioned, and the mentally diminished. The dying citizen doesn’t fit this description, but he’s expected to pay for it, and to pay dearly.
The dying citizen? This is the lament of Victor Davis Hanson (pictured) in his 2021 book, “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.” The publisher writes, “Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the ‘citizen’ is historically rare—and was among America’s most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish.”
Writes Hanson, “Today only a little more than a half of the world’s seven billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments enjoying constitutionally protected freedoms. They are almost all western—or at least they reside in nations that have become ‘westernized.’”
If we were the Apostle Paul—a true citizen of Rome—we could appeal to Caesar. But, would he even listen? And, if we the people are supposed to be free of Caesar, why would we need to? I believe we still have a chance to bring the healing elixir of truth to the sick and dying. Hanson isn’t predicting that the citizen will die, but he is saying that he well could be dying.
As always, there is still hope. For the believer, it rests in God alone.
- But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construct
