Or to put it better, youth is not a single country, but a collection of so very many worlds—but worlds that are not so sharply differentiated as they used to be when I was much younger. That leads to a global generation gap that fascinates me—and gives me hope.

 

Politics is polarized everywhere, yes. But I find that the farther one moves from the headlines and the more one travels to different settings and talks with much younger people, the more people seem to be aware of each other.  I find people so much more connected than they used to be. When I hear the cultural references people make, see the clothes they wear, and even hear the language they speak (so much more often in idiomatic English than when I was young), I sense that smaller world.  

A smaller world is not always a better one; when people have to deal with each other, they do not always like it. Nor do they always like each other. Differences abound. But I seem to find many younger people treating difference as potentially enriching.

 

So as much as I am disheartened by much of what I see in the world around me, I am just as heartenedby my encounters with those whose own hearts seem to have been forged in a world I do not quite understand.  Nor do they always understand me; I began this overview of the podcast with a reference to a song twice as old as many of my students.

 

I have lived most of my professional life in the world of texts: reading them, writing them, assigning them, quizzing people on them.  But I am venturing into the world of oral story telling.  

 

Why story telling?  Because it is the best way to explore the hopeful trends I claim to see. The more I combine the world of texts and engage in real conversations with complicated people, the more hopeful I am. Empathy, curiosity, understanding, and awareness abound in many discussions I have but they can be filtered out by the nature of print, broadcast, and social media; by the way peers and political authorities can police speech in public; and by so much self-censorship by people afraid to differ or merely seeking not to offend.

 

But they are there if you listen quietly and patiently. 

 

So that brings me to semicolons—punctuation marks that allow us to keep two thoughts in mind, linking them while also treating them separately and sequentially.  And the two ideas I want to pause between (without delinking) are understanding and judgment.  Those two things are rarely completely separate, but it can sometimes help to keep them a bit distinct.  A  semicolon between them can be useful, especially in a world in which people’s experiences, expectations, and presumptions are so different.  It can pay to pause to understand different points of view before proceeding to evaluation, reaction[AG1] , agreement, rejection, prescription, policy, or practice.  In a world in which people with such diverse lives come into increasing contact, liberal use of a semicolon makes managing of difference, learning, and communication much easier. The goal is not always (or usually) agreement; a world in which everyone agrees, that is devoid of difference, disagreement, or borders is also a world of monotonous uniformity without politics, growth, or learning.  I seek in the podcast to present stories of those whose lives have led them to cross divisions and borders. I invite them to reflect on the significance of their own experiences; I seek to help listeners understand not only those who may be different but those forced to live in a world full of difference. 

 

And so I work with Aviva Gould to find people who encounter those differences by living across borders and divisions-those that seperate states, poilitical camps, religious traditions, legal statuses, nationalities, languages, and even genders.

 

And teardrops?  Living across divides can be difficult—and more. It can make people cry and I do not want to ignore that. I spoke to a student once who was politically active on an American campus during the year of 2023-24 when there was so much activism around Gaza.  The student described—with a teardrop visible--attending events at Hillel to find solace after the atrocities of October 7 and attending an encampment protesting the horrific cruelty of the Israeli assault on Gaza—and feeling alienated in both places.  I want people who felt at home in either camp or in neither to listen quietly to the experiences of those who might share different senses of alienation, solidarity, isolation, or inclusion.  I will work to bring stories of people who live and cope with division and who can translate their tears (and confusion, joy, exasperation, triumph, and pain) into words.

 

My aim is not to present scholarly or policy analyses or even to tell my own story—I do such things at great length in other venues; you can generally find them on my ResearchGate page, or my Carnegie Endowment page. Semicolons and Teardrops is the place for other people’s stories, not mine.  Nor is it the place to balance one side against another as if there are two equal sides. (The world should only be so simple and so equal!) 

​

Instead, we work here to bring, in the form of human stories, the many ways in which individuals experience and understand a badly fractured world. 

 

- Professor Nathan Brown