Fabric of Truth Is Multi-Textured

She was going to have children; now she isn’t so sure. She’s proud to be an American, but she sees a dark side to the national flag-waving spectacle. All of a sudden, the world is such a stranger.

Jessica Miller, a 21-year-old University of Wisconsin student, barely has time to worry about it. She’s in class from 8 a.m. to noon, works in student government from 1 to 10 p.m., then goes home and does two or three hours of homework. But her goals, strategies and psyche have all been rewired in the past two weeks.

“People have said it’s my generation’s Pearl Harbor, and I don’t know about that. But it was a pivotal moment when we had to grow up,” Jessica says. “Our whole lives, we were completely secure, we counted on being able to get a job, no recession, no depression, no war. It never crossed our minds that this could happen, and it’s made me feel so unsafe.”

Jessica, chairwoman of the Associated Students of Madison, sits in her office at the student union building. The history major, who wants to join the Peace Corps after school, teach social studies back home in Chicago and then take over the job of U.S. secretary of Education so she can get things on track, is wearing the campus uniform of jeans, sneakers and a big warm sweater.

Jessica leans left, and that’s partly why she ended up in Madison. Her father, an antiwar activist in the 1960s, told her Berkeley had nothing on Madison when it came to rabble-rousing.

But she is much too smart to go through life with one eye closed, and that’s part of what’s got her so discombobulated since Sept. 11. From where she sits, the entire world is being divided into good and evil. You’re either with us or against us. You’re either wearing red, white and blue, or you’re pink through and through. It’s almost like the buildup to a Super Bowl.

To Jessica, the truth about what happened, and what to do about it, is more textured, and more hidden, than most people seem willing to admit.

She has been angered and offended by those on campus who say the United States got what it had coming. “What are we supposed to do, just tell the families who lost loved ones that that’s the way it goes?”

But she’s also been ticked off by campus patriots who have made it politically incorrect to do anything but fall in line behind the parade of retired generals who now dominate the airwaves with talk of war.

What shocks her most is how gung-ho the support is for such an undefined mission.

“There’s all this mobilizing. All this buildup. Are we going to just one-up each other until we’re all obliterated?” she asks. “There’s all this talk about how the country is so united, but I don’t think we’re united for the same goals. People seem to think it’s as easy as, well, there are terrorists out there, let’s just go bomb them. It’s made me more conflicted in how I feel about being American.”

Jessica spoke at a campus rally called a Day of Mourning. Twenty-thousand people were there and she was terrified, she says, but she felt she had something important to say.

“I just said let’s not let fear and anger justify hatred and violence.”

Although there is some healthy campus dissent, this is no 1960s Berkeley.

Within a week of the terrorist attacks, the student council got into a boiling back-and-forth on a proposal to denounce the demonization of Islam. Jessica says she was stunned by how little tolerance there was for any comment that didn’t sound like a verse from “God Bless America.”

No one wanted to hear that, in understanding how to respond intelligently, we need to understand that America has had blood on its hands in the past, that it helped create the Taliban and that its foreign policy is often seen abroad as being more about economic self-interest than human consideration.

“People got very upset about any comments like that, and they took it personally. We didn’t ever vote on the bill because we adjourned the meeting to go watch President Bush’s speech. But there’s so much support on television and everywhere else for this kind of nationalism and the mobilization for war, I feel like I don’t have a voice and I’m helpless to do anything about it.”

Just the other night, Jessica told a friend she is no longer inclined to bring children into this world, even though that was always part of the plan. But she is more committed than ever to joining the Peace Corps after graduating in December 2002. When she finally takes over as secretary of Education, American schools will turn out students who think critically and broadly, rather than falling into line without question. And we will have seen the last of anything so simplistic as true-or-false tests.

“Education,” says Jessica, “is about everything you can’t be tested on.”

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com