Revival and the Week of Campus Resistance

As a first-year student at Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the nation’s most historic high schools, I have been shocked and disappointed by the apparent lack of genuine political involvement by much of the student body. While it is true that a good percentage of students at Exeter take part in a political club, many of these students have only a simplistic and undeveloped political outlook, confined to hot topic issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Scarce are the students who transcend this primitive outlook and bear greater political perspective. What I have found at Exeter is that even on such a campus, supposedly composed of some of the nation’s brightest youth and a perennial Ivy-league farm camp, the average student remains minimally aware of global politics. As the typical American teenager, students at Exeter seem more inclined to discuss the most recent trashy generic soap opera on Fox than the ongoing invasion in Iraq, or any other looming political dilemma for that matter.

The decreasing political enthusiasm and awareness among students at Exeter, and elsewhere, proves a disconcerting trend; a far cry from past decades when students threw themselves into rebellious roles, questioning the status quo with an open-minded ferocity hard to find these days. At the root of this trend is a growing sense of detachment among the youthful generation. Trapped under the floorboards of a more unified and controlled system that is the corporate world, today’s youth are stamped with an outlook perfected and perpetuated by the media, and praised by politicians. Offered with only one view at a critically impressionable time in their lives, the youth fall into blind acceptance, no objections, no questions asked.

Presented with such an eternally linear view, it is no wonder that the youth of today feel so detached from politics. After all, how is one to believe that change can be effected when the game of politics seems so uniform in design and outcome? How is one to believe that one’s voice can truly make a difference when most of society has assimilated to a common set of political views? Rather than seeing politics as a forum of ideas open to revision and adaptation, American youth now see politics as a game so invariable that to pursue it would be fruitless. Thus, sensing little incentive and failing to grasp the great significance of politics, students at Exeter, and around America, are continuing to lose touch with their political side.

It is in this environment that even the so-called brightest of American youth have been isolated, by both greater powers and personal decision, from participating genuinely in political activity. It is not that the tools are not available, but that the desire is not present. Along with feelings of detachment, many of today’s youth fail to recognize the effect that politics carry on their lives and immediate future. In America, the myth has been pushed that one’s own character and ethic will determine where one goes in life. Accepting this view, many Americans are willing to accept shortcomings as part of their own situation and own doing; in this sense, Americans fail to acknowledge the great social constraints and barriers heaped upon them by the practiced political system. With such an attitude that blames only oneself and not the greater system, there seems less need for social reform; less need for political action.

In a time as today, when political awareness and motivation are steadily falling among America’s youth, events such as the Week of Campus Resistance, to be held on the second anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, are as critical as ever. These political activities are imperative to promote a revival of political involvement and political spirit. They serve as a source of awareness greatly needed to counter the isolation that youth at Exeter and elsewhere live in. When such awareness and perspective are not present, the radical movement has little to build on, stagnating in the face of a dominant conservative school of thought. Thus, the campus anti-war activities are vital to furthering the progressive movement in America. It is not only our desire but our obligation to educate today’s youth with the knowledge that they so tragically lack; it is this knowledge that will propel them to our cause, and it is only with this support that we will emerge capable of breaking the chains of the current system which have for so long imprisoned our hopes, our visions, and our dreams.

Francisco Unger, 15, is a student at Phillips Exeter Academy and a contributing writer to www.globalresistancenetwork.com. He can be reached at funger@mail.exeter.edu.