Letter to the Editor (2005)

List One: Winter Coat Drive, Red Cross Hurricane Relief, Backpack drive, Tuition Raises, the Coca-Cola Boycott, and Grinnell School Board Elections.

List Two: Poverty in the US, obvious Racism magnified by Hurricane Katrina, Debt Relief, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, Harriet Miers's pathetic supreme court nomination, Guantanamo Bay detainees, AND MORE.

If you had not figured it out yet, the first list is service and social actions that are prevalent on campus. However, there is a second key difference between the two lists: the first contains well-publicized, inoffensive, "popular" activities that are easy to get students to participate in while the second list is made up of ongoing, internationally-significant issues that effect a much larger number of people. Many of activities in the first list have taken up the time of devoted students, but, in coming to Grinnell, this is not what I was hoping for nor what I expected. There are more important things going on in the world that need our attention, and if we are to consider ourselves a socially responsible campus, ignoring all of the items on the second list makes that impossible.

I should like to clarify that I do not object to any of the actions in list one. They are important and to completely ignore them would be a mistake; however, to ignore all of the issues on List Two is far more irresponsible. Since coming to Grinnell, I have signed the Coca-Cola boycott, attended the trustees presentation on the Strategic Plan, donated to Hurricane relief, and I would have registered for the school board election had I not been seventeen at the time of the vote. On top of this, I have made an effort to be a regular attender of the weekly Peace Walk held every Thursday at noon, starting at Herrick Chapel (we're the ones standing there when everyone is leaving Convocation). The group has been doing this for weeks on end, yet the most people they have ever had attend is fourteen. Have people forgotten about the war in Iraq? I was under the impression that there were more than six or seven students (the rest of the group is faculty or community members) who were against the war. Is an hour a week too much to ask to keep the Iraq war on the minds of the wider-Grinnell community (which will probably have taken 2000 American soldiers' lives and many many more innocent Iraqi lives by the time this hits press)?

Even if one does not support this type of a protest or wishes to tackle another issue (I find the forgotten – and still-uncharged – prisoners of Guantanamo Bay an especially moving one), why are there not being more actions organized on these pertinent issues?

Now, I acknowledge that I am only a first year, but I don't think that is an excuse for my ignorance toward the current political action on campus. If I am missing something, I would love to be told of it. I made the decision to not sign up for any of the action groups at club-rush. I thought I would wait to see what groups were doing and then join the one or two that I thought were most important. Other than the peace walk, I have yet to find any of these groups. 1300 students, I admit, cannot change the entire world. There are far to many problems to alleviate them all, but to not do something about at least one or two important issues is irresponsible.

It is easy to donate to the charity of the day or to organize students to work toward the hot social topic of the week, but I struggle to believe that these are truly the problems that are most important in our society. In the long run, they probably are not even the issues which effect us most. A quick look outside of Grinnell will expose far worse problems, and these are the ones that require our attention – not the globally inconsequential ones that seem to be the prominent issues on our campus. Instead of being a campus of Bonos and centrist, Clinton-Bush-backers, let us work toward issues that truly need solving.