Student protesters hold their breath, turn blue, waiting intractable Gaza issues to resolve themselves

In an ideal world, I’d throw down my yo-yo story today, with a firm snap of the wrist. I’ve done my interviews and research, plus hands-on practice. There’s both a strong Chicago connection, and an unanticipated tie-in to Asian American Heritage Month — “yo-yo” is Tagalog for …

Then again, in an ideal world, life would be proceeding uneventfully in Gaza and college students in the United States would be doing what students usually do in May: study, party, and pack their steamer trunks for home.

But we do not live in that ideal world, obviously. Even a person as determinedly trivial as myself can’t laud yo-yos with all this sound and fury across the country.

I should say something. But what? What have I to add on this topic beyond the same unwelcome question I’ve been asking for years? Or as I wrote over a decade ago:

“What happens next?

“A child’s question, really, something naive, blurted out when the tale goes on too long. Cut to the chase, Daddy. How does the story end?

“The last time I bothered talking to Israeli leaders in Chicago — more than two years ago — I sat down with the then consul general and trotted that question out, my device for cutting through the endless seesawing of blame. Forget blame, forget history — that’s done, the rope both sides use to play tug-of-war as the years roll by and nothing happens. Stipulate history as having occurred; what about now?”

The students shutting down colleges coast-to-coast certainly have their candidates for what should happen, right now, before they turn blue: a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They’re so vigorously insisting this must happen, the question of whether those steps would do any good never seems to cross their minds.

A cease-fire, while helpful for getting food to a starving population and stopping slaughter, temporarily, won’t mean much if it’s a brief break before the killing resumes. A cease-fire with Hamas still in power just lights the fuse on the next attack. Not a concern to protesters, some of whom don’t seem to think Israel should exist in the first place — and why is that? — never mind defend itself now.

Students can show long-term strategic thinking when it comes to their own lives— all the face coverings remind us they’ll be looking for jobs in the fall — but fail at granting the empathy they lavish on themselves to anyone else.

And disinvestment is a very long-term solution to an immediate crisis — like sitting on the curb while your house burns down, thumbing your phone, ordering fire extinguishers on Amazon.

The hard truth is divesting wouldn’t even help much down the road. Do the math. In 2023, the cumulative total of American university endowments was $839 billion. And the stock market is worth $50 trillion. Making the investments held by U.S. colleges about 1.6% of the total U.S. financial markets. So if every single American university immediately pulled every single dime of their investments from companies involved with Israel or the Israeli military, it would affect the economic health of Israel not much, and the war in Gaza even less. Years in the future.

The line I use with Republicans is: You can ignore reality, but that doesn’t mean reality ignores you. That applies double here. Regarding “What happens next?” college protesters seem to think that Israel will just magically disappear and the Palestinians will get their great-grandparents’ olive groves back. Israelis, meanwhile, look away and let their settlers nibble what land the Palestinians have managed to retain.

Neither side recognizes the humanity of the other, which is why nothing ever changes. As in any great tragedy. Willy Loman can’t decide to start exercising and go into the processed cheese business — not when the woods are on fire and he has an appointment in the basement with a gas nozzle he’s sleepwalking toward.

There, I’ve had my say, for all the good it will do. College students don’t read my column. But with a tornado chewing up the horizon, a huge, angry vortex, gyrating like a monster unleashed, you shouldn’t look out the windows and notice they’re dirty. I hope the world won’t deteriorate further if we talk about yo-yos on Monday — it really is a fun column. Maybe by then we’ll be crunching on an inch-thick carpet of cicadas, or some other fresh unforeseen horror. Then yo-yos will have to wait again — not a problem, as National Yo Yo Day isn’t until June 6. So we have a little time.