Meditations on Uncertainty, and War
The Editorial Board

There was a shortage of umbrellas on campus early this week, but not of fatigued-looking students, who undertook a slightly dazed search for cover from the sky's assault. The murmuring crowd that amassed in front of Big Bridges a couple of hours early on Friday night-eager to catch Dave Chappelle live, and in Claremont-gave way Monday morning to midterms and then to wet sidewalks. The rain kept up, and on Wednesday between breakfast and class a handful of LaRouche-for-President campaigners stood on the corner of College and Sixth, prophesying economic collapse with an enthusiasm undiminished by the weather, or the indifference of their audience. The atmosphere in its various forms-the meteorological form, and the one that springs into being among many people close together when everyone is feeling something that is too much, and unidentifiably, like what everyone else is feeling-was glum and the world wasn't really going where we thought it should and we did not feel like writing five-to-six pages of anything. Joe Millionaire had revealed all. People were driving at noon with their headlights, and later on the Philosophy Department was having a tea. The obscure was at one with the mundane, as it likes to be in Southern California. And, if it ever had been, the prospect of war was not surprising anymore.

Someone might have walked across campus on Wednesday night, breathing air that was unexpectedly clean and wearing a jacket, and seeing flyers plastered about as usual. The flyers, or some of them, promised a coming "student strike." "Are you in?" they asked. The problem was that no one knew whether to be in or not. The war was evil, it was an act of revenge no more civilized and no more respectful of human life than the attacks that had once upon a time provoked it. Or, the war was necessary, the coming invasion of Iraq a bitterly imperative defense of freedom, of government by other than ruthless dictators. Although the most common opinions-that it was "regime-change," that it was "imperialism"-had found their voice (the critics of the latter more loudly, here at least, than the advocates of the former), with all of the other uncertainty this week came an uncertainty about where to stand on war, and about whether it mattered anyway. Not that we broadcast our ambivalence; this was an issue that long ago polarized all of the people who were willing to be polarized, and a concrete question about the rightness of war was sure, in most cases, to yield a concrete answer. Still, the seeds of doubt....

Times are uncertain. It has been so fashionable, for so long, to declare that times are more-uncertain-than-ever, that now declaring that times are more uncertain than ever is basic to the vocabulary of people who declare for a living. Times are uncertain, maybe, let's grant that. But our project here (at Pomona) is purportedly to welcome uncertainty, to pursue and test our resolve against it. So the realization that our project is difficult and frightening and not at all what we expected is a painful realization. Ideas are something in a seminar, and quite another in life. Life is something in a seminar, and quite another outside on a day when many of us do not trust our President and the ones who do don't trust the ones who don't, and it is raining. And people with far more power than we have are making decisions that will affect all of us for the rest of our lives, whether or not we go on strike or go to protests or write letters to our senators or, in the offing, get drafted. But the most dangerous thing we can do is to surrender our surprise. War is always surprising, and it is always terrifying, and when it starts we will not possess among our options the possibility of going on strike from it; and better to think about that now, because, on this question, when later comes it will end our time for thinking, and in our search for shelter we will be surprised that we find none.