In Tunisia a young woman stands, her arm thrust defiantly in the air, the silhouette of her index and middle fingers striking the blue sky. Her hand projects the universal peace symbol above a sea of fellow protestors. In this moment I realize I almost forgot what the peace sign means.
I, too, am a young woman. I believe in democracy. I believe in peace. I believe in fair and just government. But I’m scared to ask myself whether I’m brave enough to walk into the face of death and chaos to stand for my ideals.
We all say we believe in things. We believe in freedom, in democracy, in justice. But how strongly do we believe? We believe in ideas, yes, but would we die for one? The youth in the Middle East and Northern Africa would and are.
Growing up in a democratic country, we are told that it is our right to express ourselves and to protest when someone takes that right away. Revolutions are everywhere in American history and everywhere else in the world right now, but only scant here. America hasn’t reached utopia. There is injustice in our society, but only a few of us actively protest and try to right wrongs. The Defense Of Marriage Act still exists, laws are still trying to limit women’s rights to cheap contraception, everyone’s still a little bit racist.
We don’t have to dodge bullets to be politically significant. Moving society forward is as easy as checking a ballot box, opening the NYTimes.com or knowing the rights included in the First Amendment, and even then, no one cares. Society is not going to go in the right direction on its own. We have to poke it and know when it’s doing us wrong. Calling for mass mobilization is not calling for a riot – it means leaving political apathy behind.
When people do care, things happen. When Evanston threatened to enforce the “brothel” law, the campus was stirred and prepared to stand. Why? Because it touched us personally. Just as oppressive government and unemployment affects every demonstrator in the Middle East, getting kicked out of housing made people care. Evanston aldermen had no idea campus felt so strongly until far after it was first covered in the Daily. The whole ordeal could have been skirted if students were better informed and actively sought information.
When it boils down to it, are we too comfortable with what we already have to demonstrate the way citizens of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and Algeria do? It’s practically an invalid comparison. We’re so lucky that in our lifetime, most of us never fully imagine the scope of a revolution on our doorsteps. Just because we have democracy does not mean our political conciousness can lie passively in our minds. If anything, democracy makes being informed, voting, and recognizing and reacting to violated rights all the more crucial.
I’m not trying to preach because I certainly subscribe to political latency. Feb. 20 saw a tiny gathering of pro-democracy activists at a popular McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing. Known as the “Jasmine Revolution,” a few tech-savvy Beijingers contacted each other through Twitter, which is banned by the Great Firewall of China, and met up to gauge interest in democracy, even though few actually demonstrated. That day, I couldn’t stop asking myself how strongly I believed in democracy. Sitting in Evanston, I don’t hesitate to say that I 100 percent support democracy in China. But if I was still in Beijing, I really cannot say I would have showed up to that McDonald’s.
A revolutionary threshold is each person weighing the costs of supporting or opposing a regime before deciding to revolt or not. Every country has dissidents and very strong activists. Most people are politically inactive, and it takes intense provocation and an influential bandwagon to convince the average person to abandon normalcy for a cause.
I’m not asking for a protest, I’m asking for people to care. When we say we believe in democracy, we should mean it. And democracy means political activism, even if it’s just at the basic level.
Karen Chen is a Medill freshman. She can be reached at [email protected].
