On Saturday night, I was one of a number of Wesleyan students who was assaulted for apparently no reason. On Saturday morning, a member of my brother Daniel’s fraternity was stabbed to death by a man who had broken in to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house at Johns Hopkins University.
I am scared. For some reason, however, I am not scared for my own safety, but rather for the world that we are living in. But more than that, I am hopeful.
As a privileged, upper class white male, I have had a tremendously easy life thus far. Sure, I was heartbroken when I had to break up with my high school sweetheart because we just couldn’t do the long distance relationship anymore. Yeah, I was really upset when we had to put my dog to sleep in fifth grade. When it comes right down to it, however, these are very obviously trivial problems compared to what the majority of our country, and the majority of our world face every single day of their lives.
Despite these problems, it is difficult to fathom how we are surrounded by so much apparently senseless hate and violence. But at the same time, it is also often difficult to remember how much good there is in the world. People are doing good things, as Coach Woodworth would say, “extraordinary things,” every day, but we don’t hear about it. We hear about every killing, every theft, every terrorist threat, every war, because the powers that be have decided that that must be what is important to us as a society. They have decided that the most important things for us to know are the things that might hurt us.
The United States has become cynical and negative – when we could be reaching out to the world around us and making more friends, our focus (both individually, and as a nation) is on protecting ourselves against as many possible enemies as we can. Instead of walking through our town and meeting our neighbors, we put six locks on our door and park in a locked garage, never setting foot on our own street. Instead of agreeing to dismantle our missiles and make the world safer, we spend billions to develop a missile defense system. We do not reach out in troubled times, we build our walls higher.
There has to be a better way. We need to see the good side of the world. We need to focus not on avoiding and destroying evil, but on doing more good. We need optimism, and hope, because they are contagious. At the same time we need to work to make our country and our world a good place for everybody, not just the privileged few.
While we do that, people will continue to get beaten with baseball bats and stabbed to death in robberies. The key is working through that, continuing to move forward, toward where we want to go. I don’t know how to solve these problems yet, but give our generation just a little time, and I’m confident that we’ll figure it out.
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