I participated in a run for refugees in New Haven, Connecticut on Sunday. It was snowing heavily the night before, and the only reason I made it is a colleague offered to pick me up. Half of the Amherst club that I sometimes run up driopped out due to the road conditions, although it was a pretty smooth ride once we reached the highway. I am a bit ashamed to say that I treated it jsut like a ny other race. Trying to fnish the 5K within 22 minutes was top of my mind, rather than the cause I was runing for. It didn't help that the speeches at the event spoke about refugees in the abstract, with a shroud of silence around the event that is producing an unprecedented number of refugees if one compares it to the total population of the country. Some participants were wearing the keffiyeh, and I wish I had brought mine. It hadn't even occured to me. And it could have lead to some awkwardness as I was travelling with a group whose views on Zionism are not known to me. We had lunch after the race, when a wondeful woman who works with refugees joined us. We had a long and interesting conversation about her work, but Palestine did not come up, and neither did I bring it up. Did it have to? Should a person's view on Paletine be a braometer of their virtue and their integrity, given that speaking up for Palestine carries different consequences for different people? On this question, it is easy to be too sanctimonious or too forgiving.
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