New Student Orientation Freshman Reading As part of Indiana University (IU) Bloomington’s New Student Orientation experience, all freshmen will take part in small-group discussions that center on the concepts shared in the reading below. These issues will return throughout the fall semester as part of the Themester 2011: Making War, Making Peace. Themester (theme + semester), spearheaded by the College of Arts and Sciences, explores the important issues of our time through courses, public activities, and events dedicated to the theme. This article will be discussed during your student sessions on the first day of your New Student Orientation program. Please read this and be prepared to participate in the discussion.
“Americans have always felt pretty invulnerable here at home—until we were violated on our own territory in a way we have never been. In September more Americans died than on any other day in our history—and that has changed the way we look at things. In some ways we need to change. This attack was so awful that if we don’t change, the lives lost will be without vindication. I obviously can’t identify with what happened to those who lost their lives—but in a way I was in those buildings, you were in those buildings, every American was.” —Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, December 2001. Albright is scheduled to speak on the Bloomington campus this fall.
Making War, Making Peace, Exploring Issues If you are from the United States, your relatives may remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot or the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the sky. The first momentous experience most of you shared was the tragedy now known as 9/11. The crash into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania marked the end of an era—a period of insularity and invulnerability—that most Americans took for granted. If you were a child in the United States when the towers fell, you were doubtless affected by that experience. Everything you have lived through since has been changed by that day. It was “a date which will live in infamy,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking of the December 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor that preceded the U.S. entry into World War II and changed the world for another generation. War does that. History repeats itself. In 2001, a fight was brought to American soil and the reaction was visceral. Debate was short. Questions linger. “It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, an awardwinning book of stories about American soldiers during the Vietnam War. O’Brien will give a public reading on the Bloomington campus October 19. War and peace are not natural phenomena. They are made. Decisions to wage war or sustain or broker peace are made by leaders, by societies, by individuals coming together to speak with one voice or groups forming to produce a cacophony of voices— voices at odds about actions and values. Societies are moved to
make these decisions by tragedy and terror, by concern for the future and respect for the past, by the passion of belief and worries over resources. And you, in such a society, are pushed on all sides by friends and family, by pundits and presidents, late-night comedians, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts. You are inundated. The images and voices of war and peace are all around. If you have lived 18 years in the United States, your country has been in a state of war for more than half your life. “As America enters the twenty-first century, the scene is being set for a paradoxical and simultaneous normalization and spectacularization of war. Instead of war being an exceptional state for America (which has been at war for roughly one quarter of its existence), war is becoming the normal state of affairs for the U.S.A., which is currently still engaged in its longest-ever war, in Afghanistan.” —IU Professor Jon Simons in his description of the research forum “Images and Public Culture: Understanding Images Across the Humanities.” The forum will bring five speakers to campus this fall to discuss the in/visibility of war. For those of us not in or near the line of fire, the distant military actions abroad are, oddly, both visible and invisible. War has become your reality, but for most of you it is a distant reality. While you are starting college, some of your high school peers, however, have graduated to a different kind of education. The military becomes a profession for some, a detour for others. Many will find it a final destination. For a small group reading this, those of you done with your tour of duty or taking a break from the frontlines, the war is all too real, all too unforgettable.