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By Dan Shalmon New students at Berkeley appear on move-in day with a single thing in common: baggage. Boxes of all shapes and sizes, furnishings, decorations, suitcases full of clothes, supplies of food, toiletries, and sundry items only the mother of a teenager could remember to pack. Much of this parental largesse will be lost or destroyed. By contrast, the baggage they carry internally, the mental and physical tokens of their experience, will be toted from class to class, from the library to frat parties and protests, and is exceedingly difficult to dispose of, alter, reconfigure, or upgrade. I moved in to my dorm room with the psychological makeup of a child. I am the first-born son of two Romanian-born Israeli immigrants to the United States, and I was raised in a very loving home. Consequently, I was ill-prepared for the outside world--the petty cruelties of elementary school children defied my comprehension. The worst disciplinary infraction I committed then was a single incident of biting. (I bit the other child only because it was difficult for him to grasp the concept of carnivorousness, and I felt that a demonstration was in order.) In our family, learning was always applauded and respected; at school it earned me unenviable nicknames and physical intimidation. By the time I reached middle school, I approached every recess period with dread. Just as things began to get intolerable, we moved and I became determined to fit in. I rebelled against my parents, I demanded the newest faddish clothing, I purposefully avoided "big words" in conversation. We moved a couple of times, and I got better and better at playing this social game. By the time I got to high school, I was a fairly popular and academically successful person. But then I made a conscious decision not to pursue my social life to the detriment of my intellectual development--I abandoned mainstream social activities and threw myself heart and soul into the debate team. I was overseen by the most successful high school debate coach in history at Glenbrook North in Chicago. I won three state championships, two national championships, and a score of national invitational tournaments. During this time, I became a singularly articulate person with a nasty chip on his shoulder. I spent 30 to 60 hours a week doing debate-related activities, and I was ruthlessly dedicated to improving my skills and proving myself in battle. Debate was not an antidote to my childhood social anxieties--it was a retroactive vengeance. I was not an evil person but I had (and still have) a biting sense of humor. My once-impotent fury became a focused and defensive rage against anyone within range. I was a socially marginalized ten-year-old in a teenager's body, with a quick mind and a forked tongue. Debate brought me to Berkeley. I was recruited by other schools and offered debate scholarships, but a former competitor of mine, Tejinder Singh '04, a year older, was a freshman at Cal and suggested I apply. Tejinder said: "You'll be learning wherever you go. But to be educated, you have to leave your comfort zone." So I left my home for a school where I had no support system, in a city densely populated with weirdos. Debating at Berkeley was also a comfort-zone issue. The Cal debate team had just restarted and I wanted to prove that I could play the game without the institutional advantages of an already dominant team. I spent my freshman year living in Bowles Hall, which can be charitably described as a building that looks like a mansion from the outside and a mental institution from the inside. I did not form deep bonds with other students in the dorms; I didn't feel we had much in common. I was very lonely; I had no close friends nearby, and my girlfriend dumped me 10 days into the first semester. Debate again was my outlet. It was about this time that I began to experience dramatic mood swings. Everything in my life was wildly inconsistent: I had scholarships and made money coaching debate, but I failed to control my expenditures and was soon broke. My grades were as topsy-turvy as my mental states. I would stay up until 4 or 5 a.m., and my morning classes suffered. The first critical lesson I learned at Cal was that no one was watching, no one was there to arrest my fall or preempt my slide through the cracks. I lost weight, started smoking, developed a nervous tremor in my hands and eyes, and my relationships with the fairer sex foundered on the rocks of my insecurities. My life was beginning to assume a split character. I was helping to build a debate team of unprecedented caliber--we were the nation's top-ranked team my freshman year--while my emotional and physical health rapidly deteriorated. In November of my sophomore year, I reached a very low point. In panic, my parents took me to a psychiatrist. The diagnosis: a hideously obvious case of depression. Over the years, I have learned that my depression never goes away. Every time I think it is gone, it is hiding just around the corner, waiting to get me once the frenetic activity of exams or tournaments is over. There is only one difference between the suicidal and the depressed: hope. The suicidal person sees how poorly we have done; struggling with depression means saying "we must do better" and realizing that it is a battle that cannot be won but must nevertheless be fought. Hope is the difference. So where does mine come from? I have two answers -- and these are the two things I learned in college. The most frustrating experiences of my academic career involved people filled with the certainty that they had found The Answer, or The Cause. They know what causes every problem (the terrorists, the capitalists, the GOP, it's somebody--and always somebody else). I repeatedly enrolled in "International and Area Studies 180," a class that consisted largely of lectures from the likes of Edward Said, Kenneth Waltz, and other luminaries, all related to politics in the context of the war on terror. Part of the course was attending outside lectures. Two stick out in my mind. I saw Wesley Clark speak, and I remember being stunned by his eloquence, wit, and intelligence. A few students sitting in front of me wanted him silenced, and arrested as a war criminal. Of course, compliance with the laws of war and possible civilian casualties were an issue to which he had devoted considerable thought--he offered to talk to the agitators about their accusations, but they acted like he hadn't spoken and kept shouting. The other lecture was Ehud Barak's. It never happened. Neither did Benyamin Netanyahu's. In American courts, even war criminals have the right to confront their accusers and defend their actions. Not so in Berkeley, where students and other members of the community are so certain they know the truth that they will prevent others from listening to opposing viewpoints. In "The Politics of Genomics and Citizenship," a woman suffering from metastatic breast cancer asked the executive of a biopharmaceutical company some very tough questions. He answered, they discussed. It was an incredibly powerful educational experience for all concerned. If this woman could listen to the lecturer and conduct a reasonably civil conversation with him about the failures and successes of his enterprise, surely the rest of us can strive for a small fraction of her dignified willingness to talk things through and listen. Hundreds of hours in the library, hundreds of thousands of pages of research and here's what I've learned: doubt is the intoxicating champagne of learning. We should be humble and hopeful because there's a lot more to learn, which means there's always a chance we might discover something important if each of us takes off the blinders and looks. That was the first and most important lesson I learned at Cal: humility before knowledge and the unknown. A second major lesson I learned is that power, in the purest and most positive sense, is in people. Virtually every injustice, every act of cruelty, contains an element of choice; someone chooses to do
In eight years of debate, I managed to reach the final round of virtually every national tournament--and too often I chose anger and payback. Through this entire struggle, when I rehearsed or reviewed my interactions with others, I saw Dan Shalmon in my mind's eye as a pudgy, totally defenseless kid. And every day, in a small way, I took my pound of flesh from those who had formerly beaten me down. The worse I felt inside, the angrier I was at the world, the harder I worked. My senior year at Berkeley was very trying for me. The excesses and failures of previous years came to roost: my poor financial planning skills created constant crises, my absent-minded-professor approach to life cost me two cell phones and a laptop full of school and debate work. I could not live with my friends, who realized what a generally useless roommate I was. My dog died, and then my grandfather; the two loving souls I could never spend enough time with were gone. As I approached my last debate tournament in April, I felt increasingly miserable. I started to have nightmares full of death-hideously obvious manifestations of my sense that I was running out of time and getting nowhere fast. Then, before my last regular-season tournament, my mom told me, for the first time, that my grandfather believed he had been a failure. I, of course, feel failure. But my grandfather? My grandfather was a Zionist activist in Communist Romania and was the target of systematic discrimination and Securitate harassment and torture. This was a man who defied the secret police, who refused to name names even under torture, and who raised two successful children under the crushing burden of anti-Semitism and oppression. I cannot even begin to compare my petty problems with the dangers and challenges he faced. Many people did what my grandfather did, but what makes him remarkable is that he left his baggage in Romania. He left it at the gates of Zion; he went out of his way to help non-Jewish Romanians and other migrant workers new to Israel. He did not let the cruelty and hatred heaped upon him darken his heart. With this tucked away in some corner of a mind overflowing with argument lists, research assignments, and last-minute panic attacks, I headed to the National Debate Tournament. I began completely focused on proving myself and leaving my activity with honor. After 12 agonizingly long, impossibly stressful debates, I found myself in the final round at last. I was so drained, mentally, physically, and emotionally at that point that I operated on auto-pilot. I fell into the rhythm of the debate, the ebb and flow of the arguments--every part of me was invested in defeating the opponents lined up for us that Monday morning. At the end, I fell short. Tejinder Singh and I, Cal's top debating team, lost. Suddenly, it was over. My college career had come to an end and I looked around and saw 18 people who had made this journey with me, who had been beside me every step of the way. They had persevered through my insults and outbursts, my perpetual disorganization and constant failure at life's more mundane tasks, our competitive highs and lows, and the challenges of college life. Four years of cigarettes, shared meals, Starbucks double-shots, deli sandwiches, late nights, computer failures, strategy discussions, banter, work, and brainstorming brought us together. We did not do this for some abstract principle or idea; we did it for each other and we did it for the arguments. We did it to honor our shared love of learning and discussion and to prove ourselves worthy of the community of scholars. Ultimately, power and strength rest here: in a group of inquisitive and determined minds that work together, saying "I must know more, though I will not find an answer." Having lost my last national championship, I could not feel failure because I had defeated my smaller self, overcome my own weakness. Lying awake in my hotel room, I realized that for 24 hours I had not seen the pudgy kid when I looked inside myself. I saw instead the gaunt, bright-eyed, quick-witted me that I had built at Cal. I was proud of myself. And I was ready to pack up my bags and move on. |
 National champion: Graduating senior Dan Shalmon played a key role in lifting Berkeley's debate team to the nation's top ranking in 2001 and 2004. (Photo by Leslie Hirsch)
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