The juvenile kangaroo is doubtless one of the most pitiable sights in nature. Shiny, veiny, and mottled in a disconcerting pattern of cherry red and translucent flesh tone, the joey is completely dependent on its mother for survival, even after birth.
The joey is born blind (despite creepy subdermal proto-eyes visible through its skin) and hairless (all the better to display its previously discussed, borderline lovecraftian, coloration). It lacks hind legs, or rather, it lacks fully-formed hind legs: it does have confusedly shaped protrusions of flesh that will one day develop into hind legs. It uses barely serviceable forelegs to painfully odyssey across its mother’s body over an approximately five minute period immediately after birth to arrive at the sanctity of the famous kangaroo pouch.
Once the joey has arrived at the pouch, it begins to feed on its mother’s milk. It does this, and nothing else, for nearly 200 days in the case of the red kangaroo. Even after this period, it remains, helplessly, in the pouch for around another month.
Even the word joey, at 62.5 percent (sometimes y?) vowels, screams of gooeyness, weakness.
Vulnerability.
Our campus has been known to bear strange fruit. Homophobia scrawled on walls. Dirty looks for conservatives on buses. In short, vulnerability exploited.
It’s no secret that these events are not limited to our corner of the world. We are assaulted by information, mired in echo chambers, beholden to institutions that cannot agree on the truth.
If to be human is to speak an opinion and to hear the opinions of others, then we are now, more than ever, vulnerable.
This question of vulnerability has become the defining question of the modern university, if not the entirety of the modern world. What should we do about it?
The media has helpfully supplied several suggestions. We’re treated to sketches of the intellectually masochistic, purposefully self-offensive strategy undertaken by Chicago and depictions of the determinedly parochial, self-enforced echo chamber of Berkeley, each in their turn. Just as this dichotomy fails to accurately represent the intent and reality of these schools, so too does it thoroughly misrepresent the choice we face in confronting the problem of vulnerability.
The phrase “free speech” emphatically should not mean the normalization of homophobic graffiti, just as the term “safe space” should not imply a culture of implicitly or explicitly silencing conservative voices, whether on the C1 or on stage.
It is time for us to stop characterizing the two sides of this debate as “pro-hate” and “pro-complacency”; time for us to free ourselves of the notion that we as a university and a people have to choose between freedom to and freedom from; time and past time for us realize our apotheotic legacy of ruthless idealism, reckless hope, uncompromising pursuit of truth and beauty in all their forms: eruditio et religio.
We are vulnerable when we speak, and we are vulnerable when we listen. We are vulnerable, period. We should neither worship nor fear this vulnerability. To be an intellectual, as Voltaire put it, is to “descend into the arena,””condemn [oneself] to the beasts.” Whether we as modern students find ourselves standing alone against controversy in a philosophy or political science class or surrounded by hostile, hateful institutions of power in the course of our lives, we would do well to remember that the arena, after all, is one we share, and the beasts are in the end our companions.
I’m saying a lot of things in this column. Bold notions that may be hollow, idealistic suggestions that may defy practicality. Things that I will likely roll my eyes at in days or months or years. But I’m still talking, and you’re still listening. And as we engage together in this, we are both made vulnerable. That fact, beyond all the bitter rhetoric and partisan passion, is our model for the future.
Everyone on this campus has at one time or another felt that the world is sometimes hateful, sometimes stifling. Let us then, in the face of this common ground, be both generous when we speak and generous when we listen. Let us be vulnerable together, and when we are, inevitably, hurt, when we stumble on the path to understanding, let us not turn on each other with accusatory words. Let us instead help each other stand back up.
The adult kangaroo is profoundly powerful. The male red kangaroo is the largest land animal in Australia. The average specimen stands at around five feet tall. Adult males can attain heights of around nine feet and can cover up to around thirty feet in one bound. Kangaroos are relatively unique in their use of hopping as a mechanism of locomotion. If pursued by a predator into a body of water, they have been known to hold the predator underwater, drowning it. The kangaroo has somehow managed to become more successful after human-induced habitat change.
Some people know all these facts about kangaroos and still consider them just a bit ridiculous. I encourage those people to go look a red kangaroo directly in its hot, black, profoundly uncaring eyes.
They might see many things there. They will not see vulnerability.
Mihir Bellamkonda is a Trinity first-year. His column, “small questions,” runs on alternate Mondays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Mihir Bellamkonda is a Trinity junior and a Managing Editor of the Editorial page. His column, "small questions," runs on alternate Tuesdays.