Call Us Generation Apathy

Our parents passionately demonstrated against the civil rights violations in Vietnam; we heatedly protest the lack of flaky tuna in the Annenberg salad bar. Our parents traveled to Birmingham and Mobile, joining with southern blacks to challenge segregation and discrimination; we bravely venture to the Malkin Athletic Center and demand that the school provide improved athletic facilities. Obviously, the issues that confront our lives here at Harvard are significant. However, beyond extending dinner hours or increasing the celerity of e-mail lies an international arena full of pressing humanitarian concerns. We are often so involved with our lives here on campus that these world-wide problems are relegated to a back burner.

Take Zaire, for example. Most Harvard students first came into contact with this east African nation in the midst of a sixth grade geography bee. More recently, we have heard about the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis which has torn apart Rwanda since 1994. In addition, many of us are aware that over one million Hutu refugees fled to neighboring Zaire as a result of the insurrection. But how many of us are concerned about the bitter fighting that has commenced again this month?

Unfortunately, the latest crisis in the region seems to be less familiar and less newsworthy. The Zairian government, which sympathizes with the Tutsis, has attacked Hutu refugee camps within its borders, spurring a massive flight of sickly Hutus into the countryside. More than 500,000 refugees have walked hundreds of miles, attempting to return to Rwanda, already the most over-crowded country in Africa. And as the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis overflows into Zaire, the refugees' situation is rapidly deteriorating. Last month, U.N. officials touring the area visited a Zairian refugee camp with 400,000 inhabitants and found not a single well of fresh water. Such scarcity of food and water, as well as outbreaks of cholera, threaten the displaced political refugees, 100,000 more of whom are predicted to return to Rwanda in the next few weeks.

The Rwandan government has asked the United Nations for relief assistance. Although the U.N. has proposed a $260 million humanitarian aid package, hesitancy from President Clinton and Congress has slowed the final transactions. Perhaps isolationism is rampant in American foreign policy these days as a result of failed U.S. attempts to intervene in Bosnia and Somalia. Or perhaps apathy toward foreign issues, especially those concerning obscure refugees, do not attract our leaders' interest. During the month of November, while our country was obsessed with presidential elections, turn-overs in Congress and resigning cabinet members, dying Hutus were de-prioritized. Indifference by the government is a direct response to our own lackluster attitude, one which permeates this campus as well. Our preoccupation with immediate concerns has created the new apathy of the nineties.

As we walk around Cambridge, an atrocity taking place across the globe seems entirely obscure and remote. There are very few Hutu representatives on campus. Nor are there many Tutsis either, for that matter. As a result, the situation of the projected 1.1 million displaced refugees in this region remains Boston Globe front page news--at best. We read the story, sigh, and head straight for the sports, weather, living arts or business sections. After all, this news is important; it will inform us whether to wear a sweater to section, what time to attend a movie or how well our stocks did on Wall Street.

Students at Harvard are often engrossed in their daily lives. While our commitment to our classes, activities and relationships is admirable, the energy of our campus life could be channeled to other outlets as well, perhaps to issues of more global concern. A thriving campus life should become a training ground for creating active and involved citizens and human beings. Perhaps after four years of studying, planning and partying, we will leave this isolated island and realize that important issues await us across the river, on the other side of the bridge and, even if we open our eyes and ears wide enough, in other countries.

In order to apply our energy to international issues we need to start breaking down the barriers to affiliation and personal connection. When terrorists attack Israel, Harvard Students for Israel instantaneously reacts. Other regional groups from the South Asian Association to the Canadian Club to the Irish Cultural Society respond to events in their respective countries by educating the student body and enlisting their support. But, regardless of our personal connections, we should all feel some common humanitarian concern. Unfortunately, unless we feel some direct allegiance to the specific racial, ethnic or regional group, we often prove indifferent to world-wide humanitarian atrocities.

The plight of the Zairian refugees should not compel only certain geographic or ethnic groups on campus to act. In recent weeks, the U.S. has faltered in its support of a relief package to Zairian refugees. Perhaps President Clinton's hesitancy and apathy in this matter could have been reversed by a few hundred informed letters from concerned college students. Unfortunately, political refugees in Zaire pale in importance among Harvard students to poor Lowell House residents who must somehow survive three years without a frozen yogurt machine.

Of course, we do not have to belittle our campus-wide and local concerns in order to embrace international issues. A healthy balance is possible. To sit in Sanders Theater and listen to ardent students taking Justice immersed in a heated debate over egalitarianism versus libertarianism, one wonders if their concern is perhaps shallow. Student after student proposes that the even distribution of wealth creates a just society. At the same time, they ignore their chance to act in favor of distributive justice in order to alleviate world suffering.

As students, our parents burned with a desire to cure the world's social ills. Eventually, as baby boomer adults, they became the "me" generation. Already, we act with indifference to humanitarian crises such as the one confronting us in Zaire. We can only speculate what label our generation will earn.