It was roughly sixty years ago that Bob Dylan (a.k.a. Robert Zimmerman) wrote the lyrics and music to an early 1960s protest song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He addresses topics like war, freedom and racism, then concludes that the answer to these age-old issues is “blowin’ in the wind.” Each chorus ends like this: “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind.” A couple of years after Dylan wrote the song, the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary turned the soulful song into a hit.
I thought about an answer that simply eludes grasp when reflecting over protests about the Israeli-Hamas war that has been raging in the Middle East since that fateful day of Saturday, Oct. 7. Many young people in this country, on campus and off, are engaged in these protests, and the majority take the side of the Palestinians and Hamas. It is as if the atrocities that took place on Saturday, Oct. 7 that resulted in the slaughter of 1,200 innocent Israelis and hundreds of kidnappings never happened. Indeed, many of these “young skulls full of mush” deny that any atrocities took place, instead blaming the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for killing their own people. I suppose they also deny the Holocaust. But when one of their chants is “gas the Jews,” they must have some concept of what took place eight decades ago.