Americoprts, Peace Corps. Corporate Recruiting. Marine Corps. We seniors are facing infinite possibilities as we walk off the edge of our Dartmouth experience.
This year we are asking ourselves, "What do we want to do with our lives?" As we try to answer this question, another arises: do we have a responsibility to share all that we have received here?
For some, a sense of responsibility is a given: perhaps we have now to support the family who sent us here, or maybe we will return to help the disadvantaged communities from which we came. For most of us, however, we have only a vague awareness that we have been given a lot in four years and, therefore, we must give back: we want to "make a difference."
Yet when we pour through folders in the career center or hear about the myriad of organizations Dartmouth grads now work for, our sense of responsibility becomes confused, diffused and weak.
Overwhelmed by choices, we find cynicism seeping into our mind. "I mean, really," the doubtful voice asks. "How could we possibly change the world?" The problems are everywhere. In our education classes we learn about the slow crumbling of public education. In our history classes we learn the deep roots of racism in our society.
When we try to pick up one problem and solve it, we find it intertwined with all the other problems: it seems to be a tangled ball of string that has no beginning and no end.
And what about Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti and all the countries which will follow in their places? These conflicts are of massive proportion, fueled by intense historical hatreds: what place could a fresh college-grad have in mediating, let alone ending, these horrific disputes?
When our answer to these questions is "No, we cannot see a way to make a change," apathy strikes, consuming us and making us fodder for Newsweek articles and Generation X movies.
The problem is this: we become dizzy with our vast freedoms and do not feel the pull of necessity. This state is reflected in our nostalgia for the '60s; although we did not experience it ourselves (and thus probably don't understand it), we imagine a time of spirit and commitment, protest and change.
We almost seem resentful that our own college years have been devoid of such formative events. Or, for the more patriotic of us, we romanticize the World War II era, when Hitler was bad and soldiers were good.
In either case, whether rallying together around our country or against it, the choices of our parents and grand-parents were shaped by historical necessity. Perhaps your grandmother joined the International Red Cross as soon as she finished school; maybe your father enrolled in Divinity School after college to avoid the draft.
We, however, face a vastly more ambiguous situation as we leave college. The world is clearly still rife with injustice and oppression, but what does it have to do with us?
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and writer, posed a question to us two nights ago: do we have to live through war before we long for peace?
In other words, do we have to experience hunger and fear ourselves before we work to end those conditions? Do we have to watch a friend slowly die for lack of medicine we can't afford before we vote for health care reform? Do we have to watch our families be butchered with machetes before we work to end ethnic animosities? Do we have to live in poverty before we strive for social justice?
Herein lies the true challenge for our class and our college: to see beyond the secure and luxurious surrounding of Dartmouth to grasp the greater global poverties and tragedies that exist simultaneously with our privilege and comfort.
This challenge should neither be underestimated nor feared, because it represents the purpose of our education. According to Professor Martha Nussbaum of Brown University, who spoke here on higher education reform two weeks ago, a liberal arts education is supposed to "confront the sluggishness and passivity of the mind."
The breadth of our studies allows us to abandon parochial thinking in favor of an informed world view. We learn which questions Greek men were asking thousands of years ago, we study how Africans practice their religions in 1994, we read about Native Americans living in this land before colonialism arrived. In short, we learn about ideas and people and events far distant from ourselves. Ultimately, this knowledge should develop into a sense of connection with people far from us in time and space; a sense that the past is our heritage and the present is our community.
In this struggle to connect with experiences distant from our own, Elie Wiesel is an inspiration. He told us that explaining the Holocaust to people who did not experience it is "impossible" and we can accept this as true: we will never fully comprehend what it meant to be there. Even other great sufferings cannot be compared: "There is only Auschwitz."
But in spite of the silence of other survivors, the misunderstandings of the well-intentioned and the hostility of those who did not want to remember, Wiesel recognized the moral imperative to end his silence. He is a great man not simply because he is a Holocaust survivor, but also because he spends his life striving to communicate the incommunicable, trying to make real and present and horror which seems remote and unfamiliar.
If we look, not only into the past but into the present, we see human suffering today. Although it exists outside the high four walls of Dartmouth, it surely exists ... single mothers raising children in trigger-happy ghettos, teenage boys in Rwanda murdering their neighbors with machetes, Russian families looking ahead to a cold, hungry winter. And if we feel removed and distant from these problems, we are blinded by illusion.
Will we have to become victims ourselves before we recognize that suffering is real? Will we act when our parents and grand-parents did, only after their own lifestyles were threatened?
We must work actively to combat the apathy and numbness that creep like mold through our minds. To fight the illusions that accompany our security and our privileges, we need informed moral imaginations.
Our courses here teach us the facts as they are known, informing us of what has happened in the past. Information alone, however, is not enough to connect us with those events. We must invest our imaginations, which allow us to leap through time and space and land us in someone else's shoes.
Finally, we must work together to resolve our common morality, to decide what is right or wrong, acceptable or abhorrent.
If we leave Dartmouth without our own "informed moral imagination," understood as part of a collective conscience, then the College has missed its goal and we have failed ourselves.
So as we leaf through CES binders and try to imagine life after Dartmouth, we should not give in to our feelings of being overwhelmed, or afraid, or apathetic. Instead we should look ahead with energy, enthusiasm and vision to the better world we will create together.
