Once more unto the breach

I am going into the army and perhaps ere long may be destined to seal with my blood the sentiments defended by my pen. Be it so, if heaven decree it. I was born to die and my reason and conscience tell me it is impossible to die in a better or more important cause.”\nAn oddly ardent anticipation of martyrdom, you might say. But Alexander Hamilton’s are words to live by, if ever there were. I myself cherished the hope of being something more than an armchair revolutionary when they first fell under my eye sometime in the spring of 2003. It was a time of confrontation, and as much as an “armchair general” could claim, I considered myself enlisted in it for the duration. \nIt may sound a touch sentimental, but as my time in Bloomington is swiftly fleeting, it is difficult for me to remember my previous station without a lump rising in the throat. A Hoosier by birth, and a cosmopolitan by training, it was only as a student attending high school in Europe that I became a red-blooded American by choice.\nBy the time I left, I was fairly used to being on the receiving end of the pitying glance and the heavy sigh from foreigners and expatriates alike for sticking my neck out, albeit in a very minor way, for my country. Upon arriving at IU, I faintly recall some advice offered to me by an instructor that I shouldn’t take up a forward position in the political sphere lest I was willing to incur some unpopularity on campus. That’s part of the reason why I got into this business in the first place, and feel that I have well earned my small reputation as a troublesome young man.\nStill, Hamilton’s determination to physically hold the line in a good cause is the stand-or-fall hope one harbors in the heat of youth. Is it still this way? I ask myself. Despite, or perhaps because of, some battles along the way, I have to think so. I can say without too much exaggeration that being “in the arena” is the only kind of life I fancy myself able to live or eager of living. For imparting this imperishable desire to do something that might rank as unequivocal, my time in Europe proved greater than the sum of its days – and for that reason it retains the power to make this one’s pulse quicken. \nAs we seniors ready ourselves to enter a period of consequences, it suddenly comes back to me how I first stirred with mingled attachment to my country’s cause as well as to my own. I need hardly add that to be consumed in a cause greater than oneself is not something you do as much as it is something you are.\nAnd so, I still nurse the quiet hope that in a vague but definite way, the words of Hamilton remain eminently serviceable in a world where reason and conscience both point, as they so often do, in the same direction.