THIS PAST week, I received an unexpected package in the mail from one of the kind matriarchs of my church back home. Ripping open the package, a smile crept across my face as I recognized what it was. An Advent calendar -- a cruel tradition for Christian kids. The concept of the calendar is that every day, from December 1 until Christmas Day, a family opens up a little box in the calendar and inside is a piece of chocolate, inevitably to be fought over by siblings. The Advent calendar symbolizes the expectant waiting Christians experience as they commemorate the waiting for Christ millennia ago.
Advent comes from the Latin phrase "ad venio," which means "to come to." For Jews and Christians alike, faith involves a lot of waiting. Perhaps this is a worthy spiritual value, but in secular life, time is maddeningly ephemeral. God forgive me, but I take issue with the virtue of patience. Believers and unbelievers alike should live every day with a passion for action, for accomplishing their goals, for making lives better whenever possible.
In college, if ever, people should fight for causes they believe in. Whether the cause be fighting for peace and justice in Palestine, feeding the homeless around Charlottesville, or going on an Alternative Spring Break trip to the Dominican Republic, students should take whatever action they can to rectify or raise awareness about problems they see in the world. For example, Saturday was AIDS Awareness Day. Newspapers commemorated this with depressing articles on the rising number of domestic HIV cases. For students who feel especially concerned about this epidemic, taking action can be as simple as writing a letter to the editor or raising money for local AIDS-victims shelters.
And no, those that participate in activist groups are not naïve, nor can they be maligned as nothing more than a bunch of self-aggrandizing liberals. Groups like Students Taking Action in Darfur (STAND) do not believe they single-handedly will bring peace to Sudan. They understand the power of raising awareness, though. They understand that creating a mass movement must start with a small group of concerned individuals.
Cynicism is contagious -- indolence even more so. It's not always an active choice to be passive, either. It sometimes creeps up on you. If every student here made a New Year's resolution to join one group dedicated to fighting for some cause for justice or peace or public health, imagine what a model of public service for the rest of colleges the University could be. Imagine the type of thoughtful, compassionate person the University would send forth in a world plagued by a weary malaise. Perhaps this sort of University-wide commitment is a pipe dream. There could not be a more noble fantasy for us to chase, though.
This is not a call to abandon academics and carry the torch for every social justice movement. One of the great lessons of college we learn is how valuable time is, and how wise a person must be to know which extracurricular activities are worthwhile and which are not. For the overextended among us, life becomes a soul-crushing cycle of meetings, working lunches and responding to e-mails. A professor recently told me that college is the main time to build up "intellectual capital." One of the best ways to prepare ourselves for the leadership positions we will one day fill is absorbing as much knowledge as we can, from as many intellectual disciplines as possible. As a person witnesses the egregious errors made today by those in power, she realizes it is best to understand a problem before trying to fix it.
Students cannot afford to wait for the world to change. If we find problems too big, causes too hopeless, then our generation will inherit the sins and mistakes of those in power today. Patience may have once been a virtue, but not today.
Marta Cook is a Cavalier DailyAssociate Editor. She can be reached at mcook@cavalierdaily.com.
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