Our Babies

I mentioned in my Weekly Wrap Up on Friday that I am exhausted. It is the end of the semester. And the spring at Princeton is always rough. Students are in a panic. Senior theses and junior papers are due. Final exams and papers are around the corner. And many of the seniors are racked with anxiety about the immediate future (especially if they haven’t landed a job, an internship, or admission to some professional school or graduate school program). Commencements are typically times of extraordinary joy and possibility as well as dread and deep worry. That has been the case over my thirty years of teaching.

But my exhaustion feels different. And I am worried about my students. Part of it, of course, involves the bitterness and rage that I have written about in previous posts. The political environment is maddening. War and mass death. Tariffs and economic uncertainty. The persistence of Donald Trump’s petulance and the cruelty of those who follow him like a gaggle of Dodo birds racing towards a cliff. It feels like the country is coming apart at the seams. It feels like we all are.

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The expectation that we are to go about living our lives as if nothing is happening around us, as if everything is normal, intensifies the madness. When I look into the eyes of my students, I see more than the usual stress. The eyes are often bloodshot. They dart back and forth. Nervous. Anxious. Their hands give them away. They don’t know what to do with them. Playing with their fingers. Rubbing their palms. Tears stand at the ready. This is more than the fragility of so-called Covid babies.

The typical stresses of a Princeton education can bring the best student to her knees. Over the course of my twenty-plus years here, I have lived through the mournful days of a campus grappling with student suicide. But add the craziness of the world – the feeling that everything is about to collapse – to the traditional pressures and all hell can break loose, or you end up finding somebody’s baby at the bottom of Lake Carnegie.

I am worried about the young people in this country. So much has been thrust into their laps. A broken world. Selfishness and greed, death and misery have shadowed their days. And they are expected to dissociate: to live life as if everything is normal. To go to school, to laugh with their friends, to dream about their futures. To be young and daring. But this Trump world is dark and harsh, and the future is not clear because the present is so damn murky. No wonder so many of them, like many of us, find comfort on the surface of things, evading the depths because monsters lie in wait ready to devour dreams.

I honestly do not know what to do. No matter what is happening papers must be written. Exams completed. They have to walk across the stage and into this world. Maybe we should pull them closer. Love them hard and thick, without the burden of expectations to reconcile themselves to the world or weigh them down with the responsibility to save it.

I do not know what to do. But what I do know, what I see and feel in the pit of my stomach, is that they are not okay. We are NOT okay. “People are defeated or go mad in many, many ways, some in the silence of the valley, where I couldn’t hear nobody pray, and many in the public, sounding horror where no cry or lament or song or hope can disentangle itself from the roar.” A universal cruelty, to be sure, but now our babies are being consumed.

We must hold them, tend to them, give them what they need to survive this world, and love them unconditionally, because they are our responsibility – especially now as they enter a world cracked wide open.