As Max Ehrmann wrote in his poem Desiderata, "Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story." One thing I have learned about Dartmouth students in the course of the recently concluded elections is that far too often we claim an individual monopoly on the truth. I think the problem that goes along with that is constantly expecting the worst from one another. But it should not have taken the elections to make that clear to me; all of us behave like that way too often. How many times a day do we hear someone say something terrible about someone else's motivation or character in passing, or even utter something like that to one of our friends? Candidates in this year's elections have been called some of the worst things in the book and I'm sure that some of them don't think highly of each other when all is said and done. But I think the first thing we forget when we go on the attack is that we're talking about (or to) another Dartmouth student. Every person here has an interior life and issues that no one else on this campus knows about. We are quick to forget our own failings and even quicker to judge.
Despite the pessimism of that last paragraph, and even after this tough campaign season, I have never been more filled with hope and love for the people surrounding me. My perspective on all of this is colored by the fact that my mom is fighting cancer at the moment. I know that even her situation is minor compared to the personal battles some Dartmouth students fight every day. But often, while I was responding to blitzes about EPAC rules or some decision we had made, my mom would call. And a twinge of guilt would pass through me. Why was I spending hours every day answering questions about something like student elections, when I should be focusing my energies on something more important? Why the hell are the five of us on EPAC spending so much of our precious time on this planet putting up posters and preparing for a candidate forum that will be forgotten in a week?
After thinking about it a lot over these last couple weeks, I've come up with the same answer that I think everyone who put unimaginable amounts of time into campaigns this year would come up with, the same reason thousands of Dartmouth students do what they do every day.
It's because we're trying to make Dartmouth better in whatever small way we can. For Todd, Paul, Mats, Brian and Noah, that was running for Student Body President. Their concerns on a range of issues could be heard from the best platform a Dartmouth student has. Each of them approached the race in a different way, and each attracted fervent supporters and detractors. One thing I heard quite often was that "[insert candidate name here] is just doing it for the title." It's an easy, flippant thing to say. It is much harder to accept that those who disagree with us might actually want to serve Dartmouth and might simply have a radically different idea of how best to do that.
For Priya Krishnamurti '06, Sebastian Restrepo '07, Kate Schuerman '05, Jamika Wolfe '05 and I, the five of us on EPAC, our little mission for these few weeks was making sure Dartmouth students had fair elections, elections that were fair both for the candidates and the voters. We wanted to make sure everyone's voices could be heard loud and clear. Across the campus, people throw themselves into their organizations, CFS houses, performance groups and whatever else they do, setting aside all standards of sleep, hygiene and mental health. They make those groups work and make some part of Dartmouth that much better. It is vitally important to be ever mindful of the small sacrifices everyone puts in to make this a dynamic community. This is very difficult to put into practice, of course.
Maybe these are just the nostalgic ramblings of someone who will leave this place in eight weeks. Maybe focusing so much on Dartmouth is small-minded when there are global issues and personal struggles that deserve our time too. But in the end, we are here for four years, which is both an eternity and an instant. And the measure of our four years here should not be what others remember of us or what we remember of others, but whether we were mindful of the humanity of those around us, and whether we tried to make a difference in our little corner of this place we call home. "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world." Don't let those be empty words. Dartmouth is beautiful because we make it that way.