The tasks and responsibilities of our generation

Conclusions are supposed to signify resolution — and so it seems inappropriate somehow to write my concluding column for the Daily Princetonian at a time when so many of the issues I have written about persist unresolved around the world. Over the past four years, I have highlighted on this page what I consider the most important issues facing our generation — the crisis in student activism, HIV/AIDS and other global disasters, and the dangerously irresponsible domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration.

Writing columns often requires drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. Though at times I have no doubt drawn insufficient conclusions from perfectly sufficient premises. I am reminded of one student's warm Letter to the Editor: "In the future, if I want to be reminded of a middle school paper's opinion page, I'll look for Adam Frankel's columns."

Conclusions are also supposed to reconsider. Before September 11th, I found comfort in the knowledge that, while students were abandoning politics as an instrument of change because they felt disenfranchised by big money, they were channeling their energy toward community service in record numbers. In another column, I bemoaned the "crisis in the psyche of our generation — we are apathetic amid global crises." The events of September 11th immediately helped resolve that crisis by providing our generation with a mission — a mission, as President Bush so often reminds us, to wage a global war on terrorists and the states that harbor them.

With all due respect, I disagree with President Bush — I think the mission of our generation is even bigger than that. But before we can achieve anything, we must realize that community action is no substitute for political action — teaching public school (as vital as it is) will never replace running for office as the more effective path of change. The issues facing our world are too big for grassroots organizing alone.

In the concluding paragraphs of his concluding campaign speech, Franklin Roosevelt summoned a generation to action: "Sometimes men wonder overmuch what they will receive for what they are giving in the service of democracy — whether it is worth the cost to share in that struggle which is a part of the business of representative government. But the reward of that effort is to feel that they have been a part of great things, that they have helped to build, that they have had their share in the great battles of their generation."

Our generation too must help to build — and the great battles of our generation are being waged, as people suffer and die, even while we may remain disengaged. A country where 40 million people have no health insurance, a country where failing schools are a social pandemic and a country where, despite these urgent needs, the President proposes what amounts to $700 billion dollars in tax cuts, is a country that demands different priorities, different values and different leadership.

Outside our borders, the battles are no less clear. In addition to September 11th, the defining event of our generation is America's — and the world's — failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But it is not at all clear whether the world has learned its lesson — no one can say for sure that the world would willingly put its resources on the line to stop another genocide today, if it occurred outside traditional "strategic interests." What's more, because the Bush administration's provincial worldview has defined the national interest to supersede — rather than encompass — the global interest, we may find ourselves in a world where Americans are enclosed, ironically, in a self-imposed provincialism, because it is too dangerous for them to travel abroad. We must ask ourselves whether the world we are creating is one in which we really want to live.

There are plenty of reasons based on national security or economic or political grounds to fight AIDS, stop genocide and participate actively in the establishment of international norms governing human rights, trade, the environment and the rule of law. Ultimately, however, we must pursue a course of humane internationalism not because it is easy and not only for security, economic, or political reasons alone — we must do it because it is right. And our generation must enter politics as committed realists not because that path is the easiest, least hazardous or most lucrative — but because we have an obligation to do so.

Finding solace and responsibility in the knowledge that no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings, we must decide to be a part of great things, to share in the great battles of our generation and help to build — only then shall we, buoyed by energy and daring, sweep down the mightiest barriers of oppression and resistance.

Adam Frankel is a Wilson School major from New York, N.Y.