Reaching the Students

Virginia MVFHR member Susan Hirsch writes:

On a very hot day in late August, I delivered an address to the incoming freshman class of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi. These 250 students were entering a highly selective and innovative program. Over the summer they had all read my book, In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief, and a Victim’s Quest for Justice, and mine would be their first college lecture at Ole Miss. They would go on to discuss the book and lecture in their first-year seminar on “self and society.”

In the Moment of Greatest Calamity narrates my experiences as a death penalty opponent trying to participate in a capital terror trial. As a survivor of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the widow of one of its victims, I attended the U.S. federal court trial of four embassy bombings suspects with high hopes for gaining recognition, truth, solace, and whatever else the trial might provide. But I came to feel that the specter of the death penalty hanging over the proceeding risked perverting the justice I’d also hoped for and been promised. As much as I wanted the book’s depiction of my struggle to respond to violence with justice and not vengeance to make an impact on the students, I also worried that my strong views about the death penalty might mean that some would resist the whole assignment.

I thought long and hard about how to reach the students, especially when I knew little about their life experiences and had never visited Mississippi, a death penalty state. I assumed that some would be strong supporters of capital punishment. Rather than focus on capital punishment, I framed my address around a message related to their course: the inevitable transformation of the self. My book includes reflections on how the embassy bombings totally destabilized my self. I drew students’ attention to that example to make the point that trauma can alter one’s sense of self but that the results are not a predictable hardening toward vengeance. I used my own experience as evidence that in the moment of greatest calamity, when an act of violence tears apart one’s life and one’s sense of self, it is possible to find the patience to act with humanity. My lecture included a line I know I’ll use again: “A certain degree of self defense is instinctual, but revenge is not.”

My discussion of trauma’s role in self-transformation provided a segue into the idea that new experiences can also transform one’s self. Even mundane ones like new activities, ideas, and friends can push individuals to rethink basic assumptions about their place in the world. I urged the students to seek out such experiences in college and offered them a challenge: “Use your encounters with new ideas and people to experiment, to reach across differences to test your commitments and to craft yourself. That new self will be stronger, more resilient – maybe because you change some of your current beliefs or maybe because you recommit to some after putting them to the test.” Of course, I hoped that hearing my story would encourage them to test and re-evaluate their views on the death penalty.

To my delight the students asked thought-provoking questions that revealed their serious engagement with my book and with the pressing issues of our time. The very first questioner asked how I could advocate any punishment milder than the death penalty when those who had attacked me and killed my husband were intent on destroying the United States.

An obvious answer would have pointed out the faulty logic in assuming that killing individuals bent on destruction through suicide was, in any estimation, effective punishment. But such an answer would have been too simplistic and would have risked buying into polarized images of extremist others, which emerged in troubling ways in many of the questions that followed. Instead, I used the opportunity to talk about deterrence and the death penalty more generally. In later answers I managed to make the point that “us against extremists” models mask the historical and geopolitical origins of the current violence.

Another student asked whether telling my story in a well-publicized book risked drowning out the stories of others not able to reach a broad public. This important observation reminded me that I needed to be clear about my ability to speak primarily for myself and my disappointment that my book fails to include the perspectives of many other victims, survivors, and family members. I urged them to seek out additional personal stories. Knowing that many of the stories they might encounter will embrace capital punishment, I suggested that the website for the group Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights would be a good place to look!

Other questions gave hints that students held strong opinions, even as they seemed receptive to my suggestion that college will be an appropriate and relatively safe space for seeking out, engaging, and evaluating views different from their own. But it struck me that these students were uncertain about how to do this. Similar to my own students at George Mason University and doubtless many students elsewhere, they are more than ready to express opinions and to have a debate. Facilitated dialogue offers a more productive approach and might lead them to challenge their own deeply held beliefs and assumptions. These students (and my own) are lucky as their Honors College experience will include a course on dialogue and facilitation skills. This year, I’m hoping to do research on dialogue processes on my own college campus. Perspectives on capital punishment would be a great topic.