Everyone wants me to do it, and frankly I'd rather not! My teachers and mentors, my heroes and politicians, and now even the Rockefeller Center -- everyone keeps drumming the same message into my head. "Change the World" -- what a silly notion! And I really don't understand it. Have you seen it? It's really a wonderful thing, our world. Were I to concoct a slogan, I would probably pen something along the lines of "See the World" or "Explore the World." Here, I would maintain the cosmopolitan ethos, but change the impetus from something possibly dangerous to a thing more exciting -- like informing students of a world outside Hanover proper.
I would even go as far as "Save the World," but then I am afraid lack of specificity would breed confusion. There is, after all, a whole chunk of this planet that is absolutely in no need of saving. Roswell, Ga., -- my home away from Dartmouth -- serves as a prime example: a peaceful and cozy suburb that might have been plucked out of Tolkien's Shire, if not for the absence of Hobbits. Perhaps "Save Darfur" would replace the vagueness with a geographically-specific territory on which we could expend our efforts. But even there lies the danger of the concerts
You see, a wonderful feature of concerts is that entire atrocities can be traced through their wake. Take infamous Darfur, for example. At first, there was a concert to "Prevent the Genocide" -- quite a wonderful slogan -- at the inception of the killings. Then, Nicholas Kristof traveled to Sudan, and readers of The New York Times got a first-hand look at the coordinated mass murder. Immediately, the Dartmouth community responded. "Stop the Genocide" became the title of the next concert. I attended and thoroughly enjoyed myself, for the music was quite good. As the conflict escalated, so did our efforts half-way across the world. At one point we got desperate -- D.A.G. handed out free shirts at Novack. But, alas, even that would not quell the Janjaweed thirst for blood. Perhaps our music was too soft to reach the ears of the murderers; perhaps our shirts were too unoriginal to influence Congress.
Whatever the reason for our failure to change (or milder, save) the world, the next concert was sure to address it. And thus, everyone and their parents flocked to the "Concert for a Cause" this Saturday in an effort to raise money for those who have now become "the victims of the genocide in Darfur," to quote the D.A.G. posters. Don't act surprised when you hear of my first book, "Tracing Genocides: The History of College Concerts"
And if the mild "Save the World" slogan can have such impact on our impressionable youth (who now have the right both to vote and to die in wars, with the latter becoming trendier), imagine to what interpretation "Change the World" might lend itself! Karl Marx, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," once advised that the job of the philosopher should be not to interpret the world, but to change it. My advice to you, my impressionabale reader, is that once you are done sponsoring world-changing concerts, you ought to go out and experience the world as it is and not as you want it to be; I bet you'll find it a lot more to your liking than the often-horror-filled front pages of our newspapers might suggest.
