It’s been said often enough that Americans have lost their idealism, that young people, in particular, have sacrificed “what out to be” to “what is.” Evidence today is to the contrary. Nationally, and right here at Georgetown, we face not a vacuum of ideals, but of humility and moderation.
On the night Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, Barack Obama actually said the following: “Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” About four months earlier, his wife, not be outdone in the outlandishness of her comments, claimed “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand you shed your cynicism. . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Few may realize that Obama’s candidacy is based not only on sound governance, but on the healing of planet earth and a promise to transform the life of every American.
Of course, we bear witnesses to this impulse of immoderation and immodesty not only in the heights of presidential rhetoric, but with diversity proposals and organizations right here at Georgetown. One example, of which there are many, is the recent literature of the Student Commission for Unity. Having declared all-out war on that which is inherent in college students, the SCU has taken to informing Georgetown students of how “uncomfortable” everyone is with their identity, and encouraging us to change it.
We apparently have a group of students who now seek to end discomfort. Discomfort with one’s identity, behind only stress and hunger, must be the most natural feeling in college. I’ve been told that only with discomfort do we learn what our identities really mean to us. Nonetheless, motivated by the aforementioned immoderate impulse, the SCU ignores this and soldiers on in its war to perfect student relations and the human condition.
The object here is certainly not to impugn the character of Barack Obama, nor is the point to unduly criticize the SCU. Neither is the point to attack the philosophy behind either of these parties, however deserved. Further still, the point is not to brush away change and progress as unrealistic. The object here, rather, is, the pure immodesty and the immoderation of these liberal claims – the reliance on entirely unrealistic dreams and the audacity to act as if they can be realized in the form of policy prescription. This is what is dangerous.
The problem is not that these agendas fail to achieve the goals of their immodest framers. Many would gladly listen to the airy Barack Obama assure us that our lives are to be changed and the planet is to be saved, if his words amounted to nothing more than a speech. Most Georgetown students would probably listen contently to our own social engineers’ ideas, so long as they were simply a public declaration. However, this immodesty never stops at words. The immodest impulse becomes an agenda – an agenda which tends not only to fail in attempts to solve existing problems, real or perceived, but that tends to create new problems as well.
Obama will not transform the lives of American citizens, nor will he heal the planet. What he will do, in his attempts to pursue these most immodest of claims, is grow the size of the national government. And while the national government grows, it will consume more of our national wealth, will encroach more on the private sector and on private lives, and continue to replace time-honored social institutions with its cumbersome bureaucracy. His immodest agenda will fail in all but creating new problems to deal with.
The “diversity” groups and initiatives on campus are even more informative in this matter. First of all, these immodest planners require dire circumstances within which to work. This is a window into the reasoning of Michelle Obama’s ridiculous comment that America is “downright mean” and that “for the first time in [her] adult life [she is] proud of [her] country.” In the same light, the immoderate goals of the “diversity” agenda would not be necessary in anyone’s mind unless racism, sexism and homophobia had consumed our campus. Not surprisingly, fake controversies and illusionary social ills are literally constructed around us. THE HOYA is called racist for absolutely no reason. Seating arrangements in Leo’s are scrutinized for possible signs of intolerance. Or the most unfortunate of examples: The innocent Georgetown student Phil Cooney’s reputation is needlessly destroyed because certain Georgetown interests found the baseless and unsubstantiated accusations against him particularly fitting to their cause.
Each of these unjustified and rabble-rousing controversies inevitably results from rash and immodest “diversity” engineers who promote a dialogue and agenda determined to prove that most Georgetown students are bigots, whether such students are or not. Our students are not bigots, and need no reminder of what immodesty and immoderation have done in creating new headaches like Pluralism in Action and other programs like it, while changing nothing.
Let us not forget that humility is a potent restraint, and that immodesty is a dangerous catalyst. After all, I, too, would like see certain things changed on campus and in our country. Real change and real improvement, however, come slowly, tempered by prudence and in the context of actual, not manufactured, problems. We must stop encouraging those ambitious individuals who plan to change the world and pay a little more respect to those who have the maturity to question whether they can and whether they should.
Jeffrey Long is a sophomore in the College. He can be reached at longthehoya.com. The Traditionalist appears every other Monday on www.thehoya.com.
“
