I sit hunched over my keyboard staring out
the window at another crisp New England autumn afternoon. I don't normally sit inside on days like these for more than five minutes. It takes a powerful force to draw me indoors during these times of year, but these are certainly powerful times. The past month has been filled with such moments when the gravity of our national crisis brought a halt to my familiar routine, but I had never been so motivated to actually communicate my feelings until today. I have never felt so disgusted before, not with my nation but rather with this campus.
We are living through the most important period of history since World War II, but on this campus, surprisingly enough, one would think that it's just another New England autumn day. The deep and seemingly impermeable apathy present here, once the butt of numerous jokes amongst my friends, has now become a cause of concern for me as I know it has for many other Dartmouth students. If this campus cannot rise to the occasion during a time of national crisis and at the very least ask the important questions, what business do we have calling ourselves one of the nation's finest undergraduate institutions? In a time of such monumental importance, why isn't the Green filled with protesters and speakers, why is the only dining hall conversation limited to an in-depth analysis of Counting Crows' lackluster concert, why is life around here moving in its normal seasonal rhythm?
I first began asking myself these questions almost a month ago shortly after the Sept. 11th attacks when a friend of mine, Alexios Monopolis '03, returned from the rubble of the World Trade Center with horrific stories of the recovery operation. Alex's macabre account of Ground Zero, accompanied with nightmarish photos of twisted steel and bravery, was the stuff of nightmares, and he wanted to share it. Unfortunately, he returned to a campus trapped inside a bubble and his pleas for a college memorial to the national tragedy fell on deaf ears. We had planned erecting a wall where his images would be mounted and where people could place flowers and candles, share their written comments, and publicly engage themselves in the issues of this event. Other campuses have created such spaces for grieving, discussion and engagement. Dartmouth College essentially told Alex that he could not have his memorial because of concerns about what would be left behind at the memorial, who would remove the flowers and candles, what people might write and other such cowardly and "safe" excuses. A small group of students assembled to salvage Alex's efforts and erected a small traveling exhibit which was moved daily around campus. This was the closest that we at Dartmouth ever came to having a public memorial.
Since then I have seen a candlelight vigil, a few panel discussions, a pair of institutional blitzes from President Wright and Dean Larimore, but mostly apathy. Monday was my wake-up call. A group of Hanover High School students organized a peace protest on the Green, immediately followed by a knee-jerk, jingoistic protest from a group of Dartmouth students featuring such obscenities as "Wah-hoo-wah, bomb 'em!" and the like. I am not out to praise peace protests or suggest that the anti-peace protesters had no right to express their own views. I disagree with both sides, actually. I am here to express my complete surprise and disgust with this campus, that our students have been so silent in this time of crisis and that it took a protest by an astute and well-organized group of high school students to generate even the reactionary and immature responses of Monday's anti-peace protest.
I have spoken to so many friends at Dartmouth recently who feel that they are trapped in a bubble community. At the onset of the war this may have been a beneficial thing, perhaps a defense mechanism of sorts. After the Sept. 11 attacks, I remember feeling completely powerless not being able to help with relief efforts but also glad that I was at Dartmouth, removed from the trauma that had engulfed other communities in the wake of these attacks. But certainly enough time has passed that I and numerous others yearn for some connection to what is going on. We hope deeply that there are other students here who want to engage these issues beyond the formality of a panel discussion or the margins of a newspaper article. If you are concerned about the threat to our nation, the prospect of a broadened conflict, hate crimes and stereotyping -- if you possess a mind and care to spend one moment of your day thinking deeply about the events that occur beyond our bubble, make your voice heard on this campus now because all we have heard thus far is a deafening silence and as a community can only blame ourselves.
This war will not end soon. There will be other attacks on American soil. The repercussions of this war will continue longer still. These issues will not go away. Our campus must realize this and abandon its attitude of isolation and unsettling silence that has characterized Dartmouth for the past month. We can renew the inquisitive intellectual spirit that proactively engages issues of global importance, or we can continue to retreat back into ourselves in this quaint haven of blissful ignorance.
