Scenes from a Blue State

Kate Thornton Buzicky is a student at Harvard Law School. Unusually, she's also a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, thus qualifying for the endangered species list:

At places like Harvard, the military is a rarity on campus. One January morning last year, I was sitting outside a classroom with some classmates waiting for our Civil Procedure exam to begin. A male student stopped to greet us. He was wearing a puffy vest over what looked like. an old version of the Army physical training sweatshirt--the oatmeal gray cotton zip-up. I asked him if it was an Army sweatshirt (the vest covered his chest where the "ARMY" logo would be). "No way," he scoffed. "I would never wear that. I hate the Army."

"Oh," I replied, "I am in the Army." He looked at me as if I had announced I had three legs and was born on Neptune. "You? In the Army?" He started to laugh, as if I were making a joke. But when I offered to show him my military ID card as proof he finally seemed to believe me.

As a result, Ms. Buzicky's on the front line of phony liberal tolerance:

I am proud to serve, and I am proud to put my beliefs aside when duty requires it; many civilians don't seem able to understand this.

Service is an everyday thing; it means that an individual regularly sacrifices for the good of the whole. Sometimes that sacrifice is trivial (maybe I would like to wear bigger pearl earrings with those Class As, but I don't) and sometimes it is serious, such as complying with the regulations that govern political activity among Army Officers. In both situations, soldiers forgo a privilege in the name of a bigger purpose--serving their fellow citizens.

I never ask that my fellow liberals agree with me, just that they respect my sense of obligation and professional duty. But at Harvard, that's a tough sell. Here, the emphasis is on the individual--the "me", the "I," and the "mine." It is difficult to explain a group obligation to people who idolize the first person singular.

But the most difficult part of the recruiting period has been learning the limits of liberal tolerance. It has been uncomfortable to see that the lessons I learned from the traditional liberal platform appear not to apply to me.

In liberal strong-holds from Cambridge Massachusetts to Cambridge England, tolerance "is a lighter yoke when one excludes adversaries from the start--and tolerate only those with whom one already agrees."