As an example, I would offer my "academic" experience with discussing the conflict in my government seminar on the Israel/Palestine struggle. There are fourteen of us, all of whom began the semester with a different set of well-entrenched prejudices which have proven difficult to reconcile. Our group discussion is as one would expect; heated, emotional, frustrating. There is some shouting, some banging of fists, the occasional eye-roll. The questions we grapple with are terribly divisive: Is the Palestinian movement fundamentally anti-Semitic? Was the removal of Arabs within the green line after 1948 a form of ethnic cleansing?

Yet despite the explosive nature of the material, not once has anyone hesitated to express a view, no matter how radical or revolutionary. Our only "discussion" stumbling block reared its head Tuesday, when someone questioned the snobbish futility of a bunch of elitist Harvard students sitting around a table halfway across the globe and attempting to "pretend we know what it's like." To which someone else shot back that America was the "last hegemonic power on earth" and that we "screw with a lot of countries we might as well know who we're screwing with." As usual, no holds barred.

Think about it on a broader scale; consider how often in your own course sections does the person next to you restrain him or herself from enlightening the group with a supposedly innovative and grade-boosting theory? Probably never.

The bottom line is that undergraduates within the University community tend to be just plain lazy when it comes to discussion of international events, especially those which don't have a direct impact on our lives. It's a shame that a pool of highly articulate individuals seem to have the time and effort to learn only the information we need to know to pass our classes, run our clubs or ace the recruiting process. And while this is by no means a new phenomenon, it is extremely disappointing that we feel the need to perpetuate "myths" about why the situation in the Middle East isn't getting the attention it deserves. The responsibility for the quantity of discussion on campus about the Middle East, or any other topic, lies squarely on our shoulders. Should we choose to accept it or not, it's high time we stopped fooling ourselves that someone or something else is to blame for our silence.

Alixandra E. Smith '02 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.