Halloween--The Fine Art of Staying Out of It

My favorite Einstein quote remains, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits.” I first sensed how true that was on Halloween in 1958 (long before I heard Einstein’s quotation). It began as a normal night, studying in the college library.
The library shut down sometime after ten, and several of us wandered over to the campus Commons for a cup of coffee before going home. As we all sat drinking and ruminating, from somewhere outside came the sound of firecrackers.
Of course we all rushed outside. We stood looking about, seeing nothing because there was nothing to see. About fifty of us were in the drive in front of the Commons. That crucial moment came when, left to its own devices, most crowds will break up and go home.
We were ready. Our coffee was drunk, the popping sounds were obviously a little ado about nothing. Eight o’clock classes come early. Let’s head on out.
This very normal conclusion to the evening was not allowed to happen. At that instant, a police car drove on campus, up the drive, shining its lights on us. Seated on the hood was the Dean of Men. The squad car halted menacing close to us, and the dean stood up on the hood.
With the patrol car came two officers mounted on massive Harley police motorcycles. They swirled in front of the car, turned their rear wheels toward us and began backing into us so that we had to jump to get out of the way. The dean began to harangue us.
Over top of the patrol car motor and the roar of the Harleys he shouted. His tone was angry; the expression on his face matched the threat of the motorcycles. For several minutes he went on in a furious tone about God, motherhood and our duty to both.
The result, not surprisingly was a campus wide riot that lasted most of the night and required every available cop in Grand Rapids, plus a flying squad of state troopers stationed in Lansing to be rushed wherever needed—and the entire administrative staff of the college to quell.
Unlimited, indeed. A simple, single act of sublime stupidity can so often result in the chaos—or violence—that everyone ostensibly wants to prevent. How often can the greater part of genius be the simple ability to sit still and allow things to calm down on their own?
The kids were dumb, yes. Several of them got themselves arrested that night. The college may well have taken further punitive action. But their stupidity doesn’t come close to that of the very foolish dean standing on the hood of a police car.
Interestingly, the president of that college was a former OSS (precursor to the modern CIA) agent who had himself been dropped behind German lines to work with the resistance and to help set up a postwar government in Europe. (The dean was unlikely to have acted without his boss’s knowledge—since the former OSS man ran a very, very tight ship at that school.)
What I have seen happen so often among men of action (and that president was—he raised millions to build an entire new campus) is that the one thing they CANNOT do is sit still. They feel they must DO something—even when the wisest thing is to do nothing.
Could our government in Washington occasionally have the same problem? How much better off might we be if, before sending troops to this country or that, we had sat still for a few months, gathered all the facts, read the tea leaves and taken—or not taken—very deliberate action?
Sometimes in foreign affairs sending a police car (invasion force) with a dean (or top diplomat) standing on the hood causes more problems than it ends. Mao, for example, had the genius to sit still—for ten years in the caves of Yan’an, tending his garden—while his enemies dug themselves a deeper and deeper hole. When he came back out, finally ready, he quickly overwhelmed all of China. McCarthy had it wrong—we didn’t lose China, Mao won it—by sitting still.
Evil as he may have been, he knew something that our foolish dean probably never figured out. And that is something I always think of on Halloween.