Pace-Makers

by J. Christoph Amberger

My way home from the office passes a half-dozen local colleges, most of them situated on or slightly off Charles Street, one of the main north-south axes of Baltimore.

If the weather is fair -- a bit of sun and not too windy -- I often pass groups of “peaceful demonstrators.” You know the type: old fogeys who last changed their hairstyle in 1970, with long Karl Marx beards and fluttering white manes. (And that’s just the women!) There are middle-aged women with buzzcuts, Birkenstocks and batik moomoos. And sometimes, you even see the occasional youngish teaching assistant, recognizable by his matted hair and his soiled leg-wear.

They all hold up signs: “War is Not the Answer.” “Peace Now!” Even “Pace.” Because, after all, they’re not just peaceful but multicultural. (I have to disappoint you, though. The manufacturers of the latter signs are not called Pace-makers.)

On the anniversary of 9/11, the fair-weather pacifists are typically reinforced by gaggles of church ladies and soccer moms. (You can tell because the side streets are parked shut with SUVs that have Kerry stickers on the rear window.) I remember one in particular, who had her preschooler hold up a sign that said, “My Mom says ‘Don’t Hit!’”

Where were you when we needed you, I thought as I turned up my P.R. Kantate CD. If only Mohammad Atta had seen that sign in 2001, he’d still be sitting at home, drinking Diet Coke and watching Judge Judy reruns, converted to blissful peace and harmony by the earth-tone universal wisdom of a liberal suburban mother.

Pacifism is not evenly spread throughout the city, though. There are certain hotspots, one of which is located near Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus. As far as tuition rates go, that’s as high as it gets in Baltimore.

But evidently, public peacefulness may not be directly related to the size of the parental tuition check. A study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and designed and conducted by pollsters at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy ranked JHU dead last out of 50 U.S. colleges in a survey testing the knowledge of American history, economics, political philosophy and U.S. foreign relations.

Nearly half of Hopkins seniors couldn’t answer the majority of the survey’s multiple-choice questions correctly.

No wonder, I thought. They didn’t ask them the right questions: Because war, apparently, was not the answer.