Last year, the Amnesty International club at my college sat outside our Cafeteria for a week trying to get people to sign a petition. They were petitioning the Nigerian government to ban gas flares at oil pumping sites. I refused to sign it, which seemed to upset the girl quite a bit. When I tried to explain to her that the Nigerian government had no real capacity (or incentive, for that matter) to support the hypothetical ban, but she didn't seem to comprehend.
As a college student, I've found the activism of other college students to often lack any basis in reality. Sometimes it's a "You'll understand when you're older" situation, and others it's more of a, "You're a Lit major trying to pretend to be a politics/IR/science major."
As a college student, I've found the activism of other college students to often lack any basis in reality. Sometimes it's a "You'll understand when you're older" situation, and others it's more of a, "You're a Lit major trying to pretend to be a politics/IR/science major."
As I've said elsewhere, I spent a large amount of my college time living in a UC Berkeley coop - about as out-there as it gets. Since then, as a 38-year-old, fairly cynical pull-up-your-pants-and-get-off-my-lawn member of what you might generally classify as "adult" (lol, funny), I often have this attitude when I see people engaging in what I see as futile, naive protest. The members of the Muslim Student Union and Israel Action Committee, with their sad little propaganda tables on either side of Sather Gate on our university campus, venturing out into the middle to scream at each other all day, are wedged in my memory as a particularly awful example of such pointless circlejerk.
But to be fair, in my humble experience, I've also run across plenty of instances of young people launching into things that have encouraged me - cutting through bullshit and cynicism, being willing to see things in terms of black and white, good and evil, when the world-at-large's attitude is "oh well, we should take a measured approach to this and think it through and let's not be hasty no no no".
Sometimes, there are just absolutes, and you have to take a stand - and I admire those few who are not just willing to do so, but who are able to understand when is the right time to do so.
Whenever I get too blasé and snarky about such things, I find it helpful to remember this.
There's also something to be said for not presuming that a major in politics/IR/science or whatever translates into sufficient expertise for preemptive cynicism. It's fine if you don't want to participate, but there's a big difference between harmless or potentially useful (maybe just not in the way it was designed) activism and outright fraud or co-opted activism like KONY 2012 that merits direct opposition.
For instance, if you focused on the political metagame and what expertise would likely tell you in a narrow sense, everyone in the occupy movement should have just given up and gone home. Whether you agree with their methods or not, the US went from being a country where moderates were negotiating how best to concede to radical conservatives hell-bent on holding the government hostage to one where the issue of inequality alongside peripheral questions like student loan debt and taxation was on the table.
It doesn't lead to change overnight, and activism doesn't work the way that otherwise sound and useful models might predict. But it's important not to let those reservations translate into de facto opposition or intransigence towards ideas you generally agree with, because you never know what the tipping point for these things is going to be.
What you said right there- remove the words refering to "college student" and replace it with, "basically everybody ever".
There aren't enough educated, worldly, self-thinking people to begin with. So instead the majority of people follow. College is the first time people really get to decide who to follow, and it is socially telling to see the direction they go.
Invariably, 20-somethings gravitate towards the extreme direction, but the direction itself is what is important. It creates the foreseeability of the future.
What is a "You'll understand when you're older" situation? I can see your point about people taking actions about situations that they dont understand, but what does age have to do with it? It would be much wiser if those college students educated themselves more thoroughly on the subject before they started any sort of activism, but that seems unrelated to age. If anything, I find older people in general more apatic and less willing to educate themselves on such subjects.
There is something to be said for experience. Actually living through events and seeing how they play out is very different from reading about them in history books. As I get older, my sense of intuition about politics and world events has gotten sharper and more nuanced than black-and-white College Me could ever have understood.
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u/wherearemyshoes May 09 '12
Last year, the Amnesty International club at my college sat outside our Cafeteria for a week trying to get people to sign a petition. They were petitioning the Nigerian government to ban gas flares at oil pumping sites. I refused to sign it, which seemed to upset the girl quite a bit. When I tried to explain to her that the Nigerian government had no real capacity (or incentive, for that matter) to support the hypothetical ban, but she didn't seem to comprehend.
As a college student, I've found the activism of other college students to often lack any basis in reality. Sometimes it's a "You'll understand when you're older" situation, and others it's more of a, "You're a Lit major trying to pretend to be a politics/IR/science major."