Reckoning with Violence from Safety

by Emerson Prentice for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics

A Map of the Middle East with a pin on Iran

"News has seeped into frequented apps like TikTok and Instagram. The war has become inescapable while remaining unreachable. And, like all global citizens, we’re asked to take a stance. Gen Z is dealing with a strange alternate reality of wartime—we’re deeply aware of what is happening because of its prevalence on our devices, but we’re also unbelievably removed from it." 

From here, we may be safe. 

Despite threats of potential drone warfare in California and rising gas prices, my college campus and the college campuses of America are not warzones—they’ve remained relatively insulated. 

Biking on paved paths, business seems to be running as usual, never mind the air raids that began on Feb. 28 in the Middle East. Classes are still on, finals abound. Any real threat of violence a student feels on campus is most likely an inflated one. This is all true from where I stand in Palo Alto. 

For schools in the Middle East, for one girls’ elementary school in particular, safety isn’t guaranteed. Desks proved to be no match for bombs.

American college students are utterly protected from this type of violence by nature. Some students do come to American universities from countries riddled with warfare. For domestic students, though, we cannot reckon with the unimaginable because we cannot reckon with what we will never hear, smell, or feel. The violence is all painfully distant, truly unknowable.

And at the same time, our generation sees violence more than any generation has before because of the rise of technology. In many ways, we are far more aware of war than those before us. As the conflict in the Middle East has pushed on for weeks, our eyes are glued to our screens, and our screens are filled with carnage. It creates an unsettling juxtaposition between the lives of students in America and the lives of students on battlefields. 

News has seeped into frequented apps like TikTok and Instagram. The war has become inescapable while remaining unreachable. And, like all global citizens, we’re asked to take a stance. Gen Z is dealing with a strange alternate reality of wartime—we’re deeply aware of what is happening because of its prevalence on our devices, but we’re also unbelievably removed from it. 

So how does our generation deal with it? What is the rational response to what you know is distant injustice?

College campuses have seen protests about this conflict and others. Students circulate Instagram infographics with percentages and standalone quotes to convey lives lost. We hold fleeting, often unserious conversations about how “Iran is going to bomb us.” These are in many ways ill-informed and shallow, but their existence and prevalence assure that the conflict remains in the cultural conversation. Without the posts and posters, how would our generation even know it was happening? Wouldn’t our lives feel untouched?  

College administrations, adults, and professors have a profound and accurate sense that youth cannot grasp what is happening in the Middle East and in most global conflicts. Older generations scoff that students are chanting slogans we cannot understand. 

Truthfully, as we are attempting to reckon with what is happening in relation to our unaffected lives, we’re untangling what these conflicts mean in a wider historical sense. Without the necessary background knowledge, is it our responsibility to stay quiet? Or are we still obligated to speak up no matter how much we know? 

The easiest and safest answer to these questions for bustling college students is, of course, the most common response from anyone—silence and ignorance. Our focus should by definition be our education during our time on campus. It’s exceedingly easy to write over any other civic responsibilities with heavy courseloads, but also somewhat essential.  

The same importance of education could be said for the students of the bombed elementary school in Iran—the conflict was not something the young girls should have felt concerned with, and yet violence for them was shockingly inseparable from their place of schooling. They did not have the privilege to choose to escape it, while American students do. So what are American students meant to do with that privilege? 

Notably, this ease of ignorance is not the same for all university students. Some have families that are directly impacted by this violence. Some have homes they do not know the stability or existence of anymore. 

It’s a blessing to not have to reckon with war—it’s an underappreciated privilege my generation was born with. But it creates a complex situation for us as students. One of the most popular majors at my university is international relations, and political science majors graduate from colleges across the country every year. For these students in particular, forming a complex and deep understanding of war is imperative. Students interested in fields like engineering or computer science may also go on to work at companies like Palantir, which are deeply implicated in war. 

An education on a safe campus can and should never be fully separated from an understanding of war. 

These complex questions of what Gen Z should be doing during a war that isn’t theirs are ones the students of America are asking themselves every day—and rightfully so. They’re important questions to help us develop as global citizens and community members, to deepen our understanding of what we owe each other. 

Even more, questioning is a quintessential aspect of maturing as a young person—it’s how we grapple with the world we were thrown into. 

The truth is, we simply don’t have the answers to these questions. However, we can still respond. As the youth of America, we certainly have the courage, tenacity, and time to continue struggling through the work of questioning. This work, especially in colleges and universities, is precisely what we have to offer right now. And as we’ve seen in movements across U.S. campuses, youth voices—fully informed or not—are undeniably catalysts for change.

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Emerson Prentice is a Freshman at Stanford studying Anthropology. At school, she is the Campus Life desk editor for the Stanford Daily, a DJ for the campus radio station KZSU, and an associate producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project’s award-winning podcast, “State of the Human.” For fun, Emerson also loves to run, cook, and birdwatch!

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