Political action is more than voting

It happens at least once a week, sometimes more. I'll be sitting with a group of people, maybe for a precept or at dinner, and someone will crack a joke about the Republican Party. If nothing else, there's always a new way to call attention to President Bush's lack of intelligence. More often there are references to uncounted votes, and most recently, blame thrown at the Democratic Party for allowing itself to be defeated by opponents who are obviously all morons and greedy old men immediately bound for hell (at which time their next of kin will inherit their vast fortunes and continue to persecute the downtrodden as a leisure activity).

I know these feelings aren't completely universal on campus. After all, there's always the staff of the Tory (and their apparant right to own luxury vehicles without having to think about starving children in Africa). Yet the vast majority of people on campus are Democrats, mostly center of the road, but with leanings to the left. This group has become somewhat less content after this year's elections, and what I want to address is the way they are choosing to voice their feelings.

The fact that all they are doing is voicing general discontent is the key problem. When the majority of the population doesn't want to pick sides, when the most powerful leaders in the country have a mandate from half the populace, and when college students have mostly reduced their political endeavors to the armchair activism of cracking jokes about President Bush, well, there's a problem, a big problem. At this point, the issue should be something people feel more strongly on than casual conversations on par with who's going to win the World Series.

The newest trend, at least among Democrats, is criticizing their own party as having made a mistake, being insufficient to the task. Yet, again, it seems these young Democrats are falling into the same trap as their parents. They talk about the Democratic Party as if they don't belong to it. Perhaps there is some truth in it. At least on this campus, few people seem to belong wholeheartedly to any political party because both parties have had to broaden so much and cater to so many different interests that they satisfy hardly anyone.

What bothers me so much is that even on college campuses this system is so generally accepted. If there's large support for a third party anywhere, surely it ought to be here, among those who have the time and inclination to think on such matters. While most Democrats on campus seem to know they are unhappy with how things are looking politically, they don't seem prepared to make any major changes about their political tactics (mostly limited to voting).

Has everyone forgotten that actually voting is just one way to make changes (and probably the least effective)? It is the only easy, conventional one society offers to us, and so I am inclined to think that we forget to scout for others with our limited vision. Or worse yet, do we cynically assume that the others will be ineffective since we'd have to fight for them, since the forces we'd be trying to change are too big for one little person?

What I'd really like to see is our generation not falling into the same political trap as our parents. So often, we dismiss things that sound like excellent ideas because they wouldn't be politically feasible. Has our generation lost all respect for truth? Doesn't it matter that something ought to be a certain way, even if you don't think it necessarily can be right away? At the tender ages of 19 or 20 are we going to accept political caps to our dreams for a better world?

Even I want to dismiss these pleas as corny. After all, "Be realistic," is the automatic response to anything remotely smacking of idealism. Yet, perhaps this is at the core of our political troubles, our near total apathy. We accept the inability of either party to match anyone's ideals, even fairly closely, because after all, a party that got too specific about anything would never win an election, right? We let ourselves be collected under arbitrary subheadings simply because our parents have been doing the same for generations. No one is questioning these headings very loudly, at least from where I'm looking.

When will our society get to a point where it doesn't have to be realistic? We've supposedly conquered poverty, racism and sexism (and I think in reality we have to a fairly large, though not nearly satisfactory, extent). How are we ever really going to bring about more improvements if we start with the attitude of evaluating ideas based on whether they are feasible or not? If Martin Luther King thought like that, think about how different our student population would be.

So let's get out of this rut. Let's stop complaining (or celebrating) about the results of the last Election Day, and remember that the world happens 365 days a year, not just on a specific Tuesday in November. Happy about the people in control? Then keep working with them. Completely angry about what happened? Find someone you think should be in control, and start working to get them elected now (and please don't check their party affiliation first, try to talk them out of having one). Don't care either way? Then you're either blind or pathetically cynical if you're content to live in a world like this one. Princeton students are poised to enter the world in very influential positions, so of all Americans, we have the least excuse for political inaction or (merely) voiced discontent. Aileen Nielsen is a sophomore from Upper Black Eddy, Pa. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.