Rallying to Action

Our generation is a maligned one. Conventional wisdom labels us "Generation X." "Reality Bites," Hollywood's latest portrayal of us, characterizes us young people as lazy and apathetic. Whereas the students of the sixties rose up in protest when they saw an unjust society around them, conventional wisdom says that our generation is so fed up with it all that we don't even give a damn.

Having been involved in the Harvard undergraduate community's recent drive to send humanitarian aid to Bosnia, I have a few experiences I would like to share with the purveyors of the conventional wisdom. During this effort, I came into contact with many students who astonished me with their altruism. For anyone who is confronted by a slick marketing type condescendingly writing our generation off with that "X," I offer the following few vignettes. Each one is an anecdote about people who are idealists, and who are willing to give of themselves to a communal cause. I give them to fellow members of my generation to defend ourselves against the prevailing stereotype.

After meeting of student leaders at which we appealed for help from student organizations, I was immediately surrounded by eager student leaders, ready to take time from their busy schedules to help us.

The student president of Harvard Student Agencies offerred to buy us a full-page ad in The Crimson. The Appleton Club of Memorial Church volunteered to turn a student Bible study meeting into a fundraising gathering for us. Leaders of the Asian, Islamic, Persian, Jewish and many other communities reccomended volunteers who would eventually solicit for us.

At least two reporters and one photographer for the campus press who wrote about our efforts gave generous contributions of their own after they learned about what we were doing.

On Harvard administrator told us that unfortunately, the University's policy was not to match donations made by students. She then took out her own checkbook, and contributed $500.

I knocked on the door of one senior who hurriedly told me that her thesis was due in less then a day. As she frantically returned to her computer, she assured me that she had read our doordrop, and didn't need anymore information. As she closed the door, she handed me $60 in cash.

As I sat last week, tallying up the donations, I noticed that one fried with whom I hadn't spoken in a while gave $100. I never though she was particularly wealthy. Another friend assembled $600 from his suite of five roommates.

All of us are on student budgets. Many of us work long hours after classes for extra money. Yet this community responded to the Bosnia relief drive with tremendous generosity.

Learned Fein, the columnist and activist who inspired us to organize this effort, was amazed at our success. "You raised 25 WHAT?" he asked incredulously over the phone. "From UNDERGRADUATES?...in TWO DAYS? Yes, we told him. We raised $25,000, from undergraduates, in two days.

Such an astounding success could not have been achieved without the virtually unanimous support we had from this community. Over 80 students gave us three evenings of their week. They knocked on doors, and asked their friends for money. No one relishes treading the fine line between fundraising and extortion. But these students became dedicated activists. They all turned their concern for the suffering people of Bosnia into action--hardly what one expects from "generation X".

This story a postscript: On Friday morning, I groggily woke up to an early phone call. When I heard the high pitched voice on the line, I thought it was a prank call. I soon found out that the voice belonged to eleven year old Dina Hillel, of Hollis Elemantary School in Hollis, New Hampshire. Dina told me that she read about what Harvard students had done for Bosnia in the Harvard Gazette. She told me that her fifth grade class would like to raise money for us, and asked me to send her some of the flyers we used.

I was overjoyed to send Dina and her class our materials. I was even happier that this mobilization of concern for human life had spread beyond this community and reached some even younger people, looking to us as examples.

We need to realize that even beyond what out fundraising did for the people of Bosnia, we showed others what it means for a community to be galvanized for a humanitarian cause. Dina and the other fifth graders of this country look to us for guidance. The actions we take have an impact on the future.

I hope this campus' efforts to send relief to the people of Bosnia continue. I also hope that we look at this effort as a paradigm of communal activism and the sounding out of our community's moral voice.

That voice is being heard, and the louder we shout, the more people will hear us.