Gideon, a senior majoring in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, fidgeted nervously. He wanted to write a senior thesis that could be turned into a podcast or miniseries. He had researched the criminal conviction of Moses West. West was imprisoned for murder. It wasn’t hard to connect his arresting officer to a far-right group. Gideon had written West, and West had written back. Dr. Sandel spent four minutes reading Gideon’s outline, before placing it aside.

“I don’t think you have the resources to research an investigation that took place in Los Angeles. I strongly encourage you to focus on a local issue,” Dr. Sandel said.

*

A few weeks later, Gideon attended a party. He tried and failed to keep the attention of a woman by making up a rap about a feather in her hair. Gideon found a seat on an outside couch which featured unique stains. A man, who introduced himself as Rainbow, inhaled a blunt and passed it to Gideon.

“Have you heard about Tyler Rosenthal?” Rainbow asked.

Gideon shook his head.

“Tyler’s dad is hella fucked up corporate leader. Tyler was going to expose his corruption, and his father had him committed,” Rainbow said.

The two men locked eyes. Rainbow knew that Gideon had been placed on earth to uncover such a story. Rainbow wore a sleeveless black t-shirt, marked with bleach and a pair of green army pants. He smelled as though he had not bathed in weeks. His disregard for surface concerns allowed him to see a person’s true destiny.

*

Relative to other campuses, UCSC was not huge. It was easy for Gideon to find Tyler on Instagram. Gideon was unsurprised when he recognized a woman named Drea in a number of Tyler’s pictures. Drea and Gideon had worked on a group project together during Gideon’s freshmen year. Gideon still had her number. She answered the third time he called her.

“Have you heard about Tyler Rosenthal?” Gideon asked.

“I know he took a leave of absence last year, for mental health reasons.”

“I want to bring his story to wide audience. Who should I talk to?” Gideon asked.

“Tyler didn’t go out much, but he lived with a guy named Riccardo.”

*

Ricardo agreed to meet in the apartment he once shared with Tyler. He was a tall, skinny, Latino man, with neatly combed wavy hair that stopped at his shoulders. He wore all white.

“At first Tyler was a little socially awkward. Like, he helped a woman on the bus with her bag without saying anything. He thought he was being helpful, but I could tell she was freaked out. He slowly turned into the worst roommate ever. One time he made a steak, and left it untouched in his room for days. Bugs feasted. He would stay up all night talking to himself, saying crazy things, like admonishing Owen Wilson for immoral behavior. I started seeing this woman Sarah. The first night she came over, she said Tyler was too high, and we had to take care of him. I told her it was fine, it was normal for Tyler. Sara stayed awake with him all night. In the morning, she used his phone to call his mom. His mom flew in from the East Coast. I heard he’s getting treatment and doing better,” Ricardo said.

“What do you know about the role corporations, specifically the Divinity Hospital Group, played in poisoning Tyler?” Gideon asked.

“Nothing. I know literally nothing about that,” Ricardo said.

Gideon had been using his phone to record their conversation. He turned it off.

“You can speak to me. I assure you, I know how to keep my sources safe,” Gideon said.

“I agreed to talk to you, because I wanted to encourage people to speak out. I wished I helped him sooner,” Ricardo said.

*

Gideon presented Dr. Sandel with a transcript of his conversation with Riccardo, and a summary of the research he had conducted into The Divinity Hospital Group. Gideon had listed dozens of times the group had engaged in questionable corporate practices.

“If you give me enough time, I know I can prove Tyler was poisoned by his father,” Tyler said.

“You can write about Tyler Rosenthal for your thesis project. But don’t mention
The Divinity Hospital Group. If you have to write about D.H.G, keep it to one paragraph, maximum,” Dr. Sandel said.

*

Gideon spent months working on his project. Gideon’s older brother, Joseph, had trained as an electrician shortly after graduating high school. Joseph had been working for the state since he was twenty-one. He bought a house when he was twenty-four. Gideon had always thought he was smarter than his brother. Their mother thought Gideon was smarter than Joseph as well. Gideon would use his thesis to prove that he could change the world, even if he never achieved financial stability.

 

Gideon presented Dr. Sandel with forty-five pages. His work detailed the role The Divinity Hospital Group played in the opioid crisis. He described instances in which doctors working for the D.H.G. had used medical implants which had never completed the proper trails. He told the story of a public hospital owned by the D.H.G. that closed under sketchy circumstances. Bernie Sanders had made a comment. Gideon was proud of the way he argued the C.F.O. of the D.H.G. was not above poisoning his own son. Gideon felt he had done the best he could. Dr. Sandel needed a week to read it. He summoned Gideon to his office.

“I am recommending that you take the senior exam instead of working on a thesis. I am no longer willing to work as your thesis advisor,” Dr. Sandel said.

*

Gideon took the senior exam. He graduated. He found a job as a cook and continued to live in Santa Cruz. He was listening. He firmly believed the town had one great story to give him before he moved away.

He attended a party where he drank beer out of plastic cups and hung out in the backyard to avoid the noise projects playing inside. He started talking to a woman, Sophia Turpin, who he vaguely knew from school. She was a journalism student, a senior. She was working on her senior thesis.

“I am focusing on the lives of undocumented college students. These people don’t have financial aid and their parents typically aren’t in positions to help. They have to try and make it the best they can.”

Sophia took out her phone and played some oral testimonies.

“You’re brilliant and your project is brilliant. I know Dr. Sandel, if you need help talking to him,” Gideon said.

“Sandel has approved of my project. Most of the work is done,” Sophia said.

“I want to help you in any way I can. Can I have your phone number and address?” Gideon asked.

Sophia shared her contact information, likely because she was drunk.

*

Gideon visited her apartment the next day. He was eager to express his sober enthusiasm in person. Sophia’s roommate answered the door.

“Sophia isn’t here,” her roommate said.

“I know she is working on her senior thesis, but that is something I need to help her with. I am Gideon.”

“She isn’t here.”

The door closed. It is possible Gideon heard the word weirdo.

Gideon texted Sophia around ten times that week. He rode his bike past her place sometimes, but refrained from knocking on her door. Eventually, Gideon decided that he could share his thoughts on undocumented students without Sophia’s help. He spent two weeks writing twenty-five pages. He listed Sophia Turpin as the first author. Underneath Sophia’s name, he wrote, with special thanks, Gideon White. He printed the work out, visited his old campus, and placed the work in Dr. Sandel’s mailbox.

Two weeks later, Gideon received an email in his student account from Dr. Sandel. Sandel wanted to meet.

Dr. Sandel sat behind his desk. The thesis which Gideon had written, and attributed to Sophia, rested in front of him.

“Your actions constitute plagiarism. If you were working as a journalist you would be fired. If you were still a student, you would be expelled,” Dr. Sandel said.

Sandel talked and talked. He was a bald man in his forties. He wore a dress shirt. He appeared older than he was, maybe from the strain needed to keep a university job combined with his lack of interest in fashion. Gideon realized Dr. Sandel did not know how to change the world either.

For a couple of months, Gideon worked at the restaurant, and spent his free time binging TV shows. He gave some money to a group helping immigrants from Afghanistan. He received an email from his mother about a Santa Cruz woman who helped people volunteer with the elderly. I know you want to change the world, his mother wrote.

The woman’s name was Janis Brown. She had broad shoulders and long gray hair. The first time Gideon and Janis met, he found her to be a mix between a high school principal and an ex-biker. The Harley lady who wanted to live straight. She arranged for Gideon to visit a woman named Ethel. Ethel no longer recognized the face of her children. They lived far away.

Gideon met Ethel inside of her senior care facility. Everyone in her unit had memory issues. He had to pass through a locked door to enter.

She sat in a room with twenty other seniors. A Lifetime movie played on TV.

“Where are we going?” Ethel asked.

“We’re just hanging out,” Gideon said.

“It would be nice to go somewhere.”

They sat for ten minutes.

“Where are we going?” Ethel asked again.

Gideon texted Janis. He asked if he could give Ethel a ride in his car.

Insurance companies aren’t going to dictate how we care for one another, Janis wrote back.

Gideon slowly helped Ethel out of the building. None of the employees stopped him. He had to give her step by step instructions on how to get in the front seat. First her butt went down, then her feet went inside, next the seat belt.

He drove to the down town strip. Families were eating dinner outside. People of all ages were walking around. Ethel stared at the scene and her face lit up. Gideon knew he had changed the world for one person.

 

 

 

 

Ozzy
stuck pennies in Huey’s door, wedging it shut, and we all stood in the hallway
and laughed as he tried to get out. Serinson and Crater built a wall of beer
cans and set it outside Gregg’s door so he crashed into it on his way to the
shower the next morning. Butthead and No-neck tied a rope to the handle of two
doors across the hallway from each other so no one in either room could get
out, and I have to say I found the shouts amusing, quizzical and comical at
first, growing increasingly angry, until the entire dorm was filled with the
word fuck.  

On Sundays Simpson wandered the perimeter of the tennis courts collecting lost balls; late Sunday night, from his third floor window, he and I aimed them at the cars below us in the lot, setting off the alarms, shattering the one night of stillness on campus. Devins threw Skoal packets in the washers and dryers in the community laundry, and Jenkins filled the soap dispensers with mayonnaise. Every night someone flooded the sinks, and every morning some new witticism like “Here I sit broken-hearted” had been scrawled on the toilet stalls.

When Pace passed out we drew a penis on his face. When Stevenson slept we shaved him, then short-sheeted his bed. Davids we ducted-taped his wrists and ankles together, and the only thing that kept us from taping shut his mouth was we were afraid he might choke on his own vomit, drunk as we all were.

What
we didn’t do was go to class. I’ll say it was because we were too tired from
constantly watching our backs, or maybe it’s that we only have so much
creativity inside us, and when we use it coming up with ways to attack others,
we forget to expand ourselves. It’s also possible we had given up. Or were so
busy trying to lock someone else in that we shut ourselves out, too busy attacking
to protect.  

That first semester we had all been friends. It was only in the winter, when the First Gulf War began, that we tried to hurt each other. This was after watching the news every night: the bombs over Baghdad, the Tomahawk missiles flying in from the Red Sea. We didn’t know then how war would loom over our adult lives, how we’d move from one war to another without even realizing we’d moved. No wonder we were too tired to go to class, or care. No wonder we built so many walls, shut so many doors. It would be years before I quit sabotaging others, and still more before I realized there’s no end to the creativity we can control, it’s only that there’s a limit to how much emotion we can handle. I’ll prove it to you now. Tell me, when’s the last time you remembered we were still at war?

Paul Crenshaw is a writer and essayist. His essay collection “This One Will Hurt You” was published by The Ohio State University Press in spring 2019. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by Houghton Mifflin and W.W. Norton, Oxford American, Tin House, Brevity, North American Review, and Glimmer Train, among others.

I’m writing this on the eve of Veterans Day, an annual observance in America that becomes both less and more important to me with each passing year. It’s important to view days or periods of time as special; I’m not sure when that began, and I assume there was originally a religious or superstitious connotation to “special days,” but now the special days with which one identifies form an important part of one’s identity.

In thinking about Veterans Day, and what it means to me, I have to admit that many days feel like “Veterans Day” in America. Part of that is my friend circle—as someone who is interested in affairs that affect veterans, I’m constantly encountering them on social media, as well as in the news. It helps that identifying as a veteran is seen, now, as a largely apolitical gesture, and one that is fairly unbiased when it comes to race, religion, sex, or gender (individual experiences will vary on this point, but I’m speaking broadly). In general, veterans tend to feel appreciated in US society. And when they don’t, they let people know.

Being a “veteran” is different from being a part of any other special interest group, especially ones involving birth. Nevertheless, being a veteran is similar in that few civilians know or understand what they’re getting into when they join the military. One goes through basic training and advanced training, and the point of it all is to strip you of your identity as a citizen—to make you simultaneously less and more. Once you join the military, you have become something that you never were as a civilian—part of a unified collective—and once you leave, you are stripped of that collective. Even the people who misbehave, the anti-authoritarians (as I was), the renegades, the individualists—even they are not unaffected by the curious taking off of identity, of returning to what one was before the military changed you—this is a large part of what it means to be a veteran—to know loss, to understand what it means to have been part of a special team.

Not every group in America does feel appreciated, or even safe, necessarily, within the identity that has been assigned to them. I’m currently lecturing a course at Yale called “Memoir and the War on Terror, which has been in the news recently because certain minority groups do not feel safe on campus—intellectually, culturally. The source of the problem some students have with Yale clearly has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is eliciting the usual spectrum of responses. The left, broadly, supports what appears to be a valid concern on the part of students who do not want to be confronted by crude caricatures of their cultures. Yet all over the right, there exists much handwringing over liberal fascism and the thought-police, moderately described by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic and less moderately by people writing for Breitbart and other right-wing sites.

Academia is not crumbling; it’s not under attack; our freedom is secure. What’s happening, near Veterans Day (conveniently for my meditation on that which makes me special and unique in terms of social identity beyond my being special and unique by virtue of my chemical and physical composition), on the Yale campus and at the University of Missouri, is that people are engaged in dialogue. There have been threats, intimidation, and strong language, but unlike in many areas on earth, there haven’t been gunfights or brawls. There’s been language.

When my father was graduating from Yale in the Spring of 1970, there were protests on New Haven Green tied to a murder trial of the Black Panthers. Someone called out the Connecticut National Guard. My father remembers smelling tear gas on campus—the Green is beside Old Campus, where most freshmen live at Yale. Tanks and uniformed soldiers were on the streets. Kent State loomed at the forefront of people’s memories, where students had been shot. That was a protest.

Today, some students don’t feel safe and are congregating, are meeting with professors, and—sometimes—are shouting. There are no tanks, no soldiers, no riot police. No tear gas. The Silliman Master, whose wife provoked this firestorm with a (as Friedersdorf points out) fairly rational, defensible, unintentionally incendiary email, stands (in a prominent YouTube video) in the middle of a group of students—despite being yelled at, he remains calm; his life and safety are not in danger.

We’ve come a long way, collectively, since the days of Vietnam. Veterans of Vietnam came home to an almost-non-functional VA, and were alienated by veterans of WWII and Korea, as well as by segments of the US population. Society itself was in turmoil, everywhere. Today, Veterans of the War on Terror are accepted despite their participation in a war that makes even less sense than Vietnam. Veterans come home to parades, a less-broken VA, and an appreciative (or, at least not a hostile) population. Veterans have it good.

And society has it good. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re far better than they were forty, fifty years ago. The events unfolding at Yale and on other college campuses today are products of integration and products of a democratic society wherein people can speak up and speak out. That’s a good thing.

I’m pleased with what is happening on college campuses and proud that being a veteran of the United States of America’s armed forces is part of my identity. Life isn’t perfect—it never was, and it never will be—but so far, we’re doing it better than just about anyone else in the world.