Potential for change tangible
Parallax
Alan Ouellette |
I’M SURE THAT we can all think back to a time before the Department of Homeland Security, air marshals, and political commentators such as Newt Gingrich declaring that World War III has begun.
Sure, the strategic use of terror has been in existence long before these recent developments — the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 immediately come to mind.
But these, at least for me, always seemed like distant realities. They somehow weren’t real. Life appeared to go on as usual.
Today, however, the topic of terror has pervaded the American conscious — political discourse centers on the subject, we have gone to and supported wars to prevent it, and have had some of our civil liberties curtailed as a result of this new era we appear to be entering.
As university students, we’re confronted with the many problems of the world daily both inside and outside of the classroom and are encouraged to become forces of positive change in our communities and our country, slowly overhauling the status quo.
When you take a look around campus, how optimistic are you with this prospect?
My concern is that, in the face of the many challenges we are being called on to help solve, college-age people are becoming increasingly apathetic and averse to the idea that they can contribute to any tangible sense of change on a macrocosmic level.
One only needs to turn on the news or open a newspaper to see the startling reality of the world we’re coming to age in — tension in the Middle East, war on multiple fronts (one of which is being likened to a civil war), the overriding hatred of Americans in many parts of the world, not to mention the probability that our country will continue to be the target of terrorist organizations.
It is discouraging and, on some level, our apathy is warranted. Many of us are at a point where we are growing uncomfortable living in such hostile and unstable times — something that we have arguably inherited from another generation’s attitudes, assumptions, and political decision-making.
Closeting ourselves from this reality is indeed the easy way out. But, to do so would not only be unfair to ourselves, it would be wrong to burden future generations with these unresolved dilemmas, to make history, as Stephen Dedalus asserts in “Ulysses,” a nightmare from which they’ll desperately try to awake.
We can’t rely on members of preceding generations to make the world a more habitable place. A culture of terror is what they have left us and now it is our turn to seek answers to problems that have persisted for much too long.
Deconstructing this emerging culture of fear, while countering our own passive acceptance of the world, should be our top priority.
Rather than relying on high intelligence and defense budgets to keep us safe, we should make strides toward understanding those intent on being our enemy — their culture, the effects of our foreign policies on their existence, and what common ground, if any, we’ll have to work with.
In this way, our generation’s solutions have the potential to be much broader in scope than those currently in political office. While preventing terrorist attacks, we should also foster a spirit of empathy and compromise that seeks long term, permanent solutions.
Escaping the modus operandi that has brought us to this moment is crucial, but impossible to realize if we refuse to understand the promise of our generation and the positive impact we can make if we unite and make our voices heard.
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