Accosted in the agora

When I see a young guy or girl up ahead, holding a clipboard, I instinctively search frantically for an alternative route.

I walked across campus today, and there they were. Between Frosh Pond and Kane Hall -- not all that long a distance, as many of you know -- there must have been at least eight earnest looking students bearing clipboards, shouting out smiling greetings to all who passed. I felt like a pinball, bouncing off pins, as I wove my way through the obstacle course.

They looked like nice kids, and they were probably backing some worthy political cause, or seeking support for impoverished children abroad. A few are paid solicitors, I suspect; most are freely donating their time. Very few -- Scientologists, mainly -- are actual threats to rational society. But -- to me -- all of them are irritations to be avoided at all costs.

After smiling a fake smile and yelling, "Sorry, not interested" at four or five young people during the course of a three-minute walk, my imagination took on a darkish hue. I pictured with satisfaction legions of university police bearing truncheons, beating these kids into submission and dragging them away in police vans. Are there no trespass laws, I asked? Are there no protections for a simple fellow (like me) who simply wishes to cross campus, daydreaming his way along, unmolested by grinning teenagers?

Then my thoughts turned to Socrates -- aging, wild-haired, poorly dressed, fresh from his stoneyard, asking searching and unwelcome questions of passers-by. "I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think," he would admonish. "Know thyself," he would plead. How fortunate we would have been, we like to believe, to have lived in a day when we could have heard his discourses, could have exchanged thoughts with such an amazing philosopher. In reality, I admit, my heart would have sunk if I'd ever seen him standing before me, begging me to know myself, when I was in a hurry to reach the wine market before it closed.

And don't even get me started on John the Baptist. "Really, dude, and I mean this in the best possible way, if you're going to live on locusts and honey, you've got to brush your teeth before haranguing normal folks like me."

As I laughed at myself -- a necessarily frequent reaction to myself -- I realized that the first amendment doesn't permit free speech only when I'm good and ready to listen. Let's face it -- I'm never in the mood to hear about poverty-stricken kids in Honduras. Tons of mail goes from my mailbox unopened to the recycling bin. Advocates of unpopular causes -- or even just uninteresting causes -- sometimes have to resort to jarring, or at least intrusive, approaches, just to force me to listen. It's all too easy in today's world to surround myself with protective layers of insulation, excluding any thought or voice that makes me in the least bit uncomfortable or intrudes on my precious privacy.

I ought to welcome the recognition that there are young people willing to stand out in the cold on a busy college campus -- during finals week -- responding to repeated rejection with a smile and a "thanks anyway," in support of a cause in which they strongly believe.

And I do. Still, that doesn't mean I won't head in the other direction if I see them in time!