We tried to flee beyond the sadness, anger and political chaos enveloping our country in recent months by heading for the 90th birthday party of a friend who fled Germany with his mother and younger brother just before World War II.

At his 70th birthday celebration two decades ago, Arnie Joseph included several of his older relatives who also escaped the Holocaust. They talked of things Arnie seldom mentioned, including his time as an Army translator at the Nuremberg trials, when he spent his weekends looking for news of lost relatives and friends.

After Arnie turned 80, he visited us in New Hampshire, and on a bicycle ride around Hanover we visited the Dartmouth College boathouse. Along the steep path uphill from the boathouse to the campus I watched him pass me on a borrowed bike.

On our way to Arnie’s most recent celebration in Ohio, we detoured to Tennessee, where wildflowers had just begun to appear in the Smoky Mountains. And we visited the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. Begun in 1925, the folk school is a reminder that rural American culture is often more beautiful and welcoming than its support of Donald Trump might suggest.

In the music, blacksmithing, pottery, cooking, drawing, gardening, glass-blowing, weaving, knitting, needlework, painting, quilting, spinning, sculpture, storytelling, woodcarving, writing and many other arts celebrated and taught in Brasstown, people seem to find “the best we have in us,” as the school’s retiring director, Jan Davidson, recently put it.

While we were basking in an educational institution built from Appalachian mountain culture, students at Middlebury College were silencing Charles Murray, co-author with Richard Herrnstein of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which some have used to provide statistical and theoretical support for unjust policies like those developed by the Trump administration. A few Middlebury students went beyond silencing Murray to attacking him and giving Allison Stanger, a faculty member walking with him, whiplash and a concussion.

We returned to the Upper Valley and the Valley News to find columnist Steve Nelson defending the Middlebury meltdown and similar “boisterous college events” around the country as examples of protest we should encourage in this time of Trump (“Campuses Grow Uneasy, and That’s a Good Thing,” March 19). Those who criticize such student behavior, Nelson argues, are guilty of “false equivalence” by making a case that rebuking a white nationalist “is tantamount to the assault on free speech being waged by the White House.” Nelson concludes that even though a few Middlebury students used poor judgment, “we should applaud the fact that they love our country enough to want to save it.”

Older readers may remember a time in 1968 when a U.S. major explained the decision to bomb Ben Tre, a town in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. He said: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” If saving our nation requires silencing people, we’ll destroy more than our colleges and universities. If we are educating young people incapable of developing strong arguments against thinking that undermines our free society, we endanger our democracy.

A professor of German spoke at the 90th birthday celebration for our friend Arnie. She told of her friendship with Arnie, who taught French, and she mentioned that she tried for several years to get him to come to her class when she taught about the Holocaust. He chose never to speak German, Arnie told her, for reasons he didn’t have to explain. But as their friendship grew, he relented, came to her class, and spoke his native language once again.

When we silence ourselves and people with whom we disagree on matters of great importance, we remove the possibility of knowing them and fully understanding the reasons behind our disagreements. It’s going to take considerable understanding, as well as courageous opposition, to heal the deep divisions in our troubled country.

Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.