The Will to Move On

One night last fall, as I sat in a lecture hall watching a documentary for my history class about British human rights abuses in colonial Kenya, I was struck by a familiar feeling of hopelessness. I saw myself and my peers leaving our neon green seats of Science Center E, knowing that each of us would snap back into our lives at Harvard, complete with dining-hall menus and shuttle schedules, and leave the somber thoughts of detention camps behind.

When the news media or, recently, graduates from the ardent class of 1967 call today’s students “apathetic,” they seem to be referring to this inaction, not necessarily with regard to human rights abuses from half a century ago, but to the war in Iraq, mass murder in Darfur, or any number of contemporary tragedies. But our generation’s passive reaction to global injustice indicates nothing about whether or not we care, it is merely an indication of our acquired ability to move on in the presence of injustice while still doing what we can to contribute.

The truth is that though current undergraduates do not show the activist urge of our Vietnam-era counterparts, we can hardly be called apathetic; our “caring” simply takes a different form than the brand that led our predecessors to take over University Hall. Why else would we be involved in community service and social justice, take classes on human rights, study abroad to learn more about other cultures, and spend time seeking information about these abuses inside and outside of the classroom?

It’s perhaps more important, however, that we come to grips with our unique cultural context. First, the fact is that we are among the first generations to be raised in a society saturated by the mass media (and the often jarring images they convey), and this cannot be understated. How else can we explain our capacity to bear witness to such terrible things without ever taking political action? We seem appallingly able to witness devastating crimes on the television and then go back to pleasant dinner conversation, almost without blinking.

Maybe in this easy transition from worrying about torture to worrying about textbooks, our raised awareness has degenerated into desensitization to violence. Maybe we’ve lost the ability to care in the conventional sense. Documentaries on current humanitarian crises like the genocide in Darfur have been made with the intention of inciting action from the viewers, often falling back on simple shock value. But even that effective activist tool has lost some of its resonance for our media-minded generation: it takes a lot to shock us. We’ve been pushed to a new extreme at which even genuine instances of human suffering lose their emotional, motivational power.

Even still, our generational predicament has little to do with actual apathy. Instead, our empathy has been buried in overexposure to images and the realistic attitude that came with it. Our more sophisticated view of international injustice leads many to throw up their hands who might otherwise have raised a banner or taken up a megaphone. There is almost too much information available: reminding us all of the scope of today’s problems and the looming barriers to our good intentions, curbing our ambitions to save the world. We’re daunted by the incapacity of activism to make positive, lasting change, and often opt instead to improve conditions in our own neighborhoods through community service.

Those of us on campus today do not lack the transformative ambitions of its past residents; we simply lack direction. We’ve grown up aware of the enormity of war, torture and corruption. So though we can (and often do) try to learn about the tragedies of our world, we also have to learn to live with them. We set up from our neon-green seats caring, frustrated, but with a need to move on.

Megan A. Shutzer ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.