I am 62 years old and have reached a point in my life where I can choose how to spend my time. For the moment, I’m choosing to spend some of it here. Teaching at Wesleyan brings me immense joy. I love seeing my students the moment I set foot in the classroom and when our paths cross on campus. Spending time with you is one of my great pleasures. I hope you can sense that. But you need to know that what’s taking place in the United States is causing me, people I love, and countless millions extraordinary pain—as we witness a world we and those who came before us worked so hard to create be torn asunder by cruelty and deception.

I do not care who you voted for in the last election. It’s none of my business. But I do care about how you “see” others. Or more specifically, that you see others not “as others” but like those whom you love most in the world—each with their own dreams, aspirations, and desires for a good life; that you never lose your capacity to recognize that but for a random roll of the cosmic dice, “you” could be “they” and “they” could be “you.”

Cruelty and deception, of course, are not the same as remaining silent in the face of cruelty and deception. The former is an order of magnitude more egregious than the latter. But … there are times when that silence comes perilously close to that same cruelty and deception—when the choice not to see, not to listen, not to respond, not to “look up”—while perhaps necessary to preserve one’s sanity in a world gone mad—unwittingly contributes to and provides support for that madness. When looking the other way, pretending we can put our values on some “do not disturb” mode, and metaphorically, if not literally, clicking our personal mute button has the same effect of endorsing what we detest.

In my sophomore year at Wesleyan (1981), I took a literature class. In it, we read Bread and Wine, (1936) a novel by the Italian anti-fascist author, Ignazio Silone. A single passage in the novel changed my life: “How miserable is intelligence if it’s good for nothing but making alibies to keep the conscience quiet.” That passage has been my North Star for more than four decades. I invite you to accept it as yours. Every one of us has the capacity to rationalize our actions—to say nothing of our absence of actions, which is more often the case. I do it all the time. We all do. I’m doing it right now as I type this letter—as opposed to, say, participating in an act of civil disobedience, putting my body and liberty at risk, and accepting the consequences of doing so—like countless thousands have done over the past years, decades, centuries, and millennia so that we might take for granted so much of what makes life worth living.

I feel a deep responsibility to acknowledge that my generation has left you with significant challenges to overcome—not the least of which being the obscene cost of attending a school like Wesleyan. But I also believe that sometimes we need the darkness to find our light—so we might learn not only who we are but who we are not. I am so grateful that the future is in your hands because the thought of it remaining in the hands of those who came to power in the United States just four short weeks ago is simply unbearable. Your future starts right now. Don’t give it up without a fight.