Hey You. It's official; You are Time's Person of the Year. Yes, You. As Time put it, they chose You for a very special reason:
"It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."
Sound familiar? It should. It once happened on this very campus. A silent demonstration at Duke, April 5 to April 11, 1968, following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nearly 40 years ago, members of a predominantly white student body didn't attend class, slept on the quad and remained silent except at meal times to protest the treatment of non-academic black employees at the University and express collective frustration in the wake of King's death.
So, my question: Where were You this past Monday?
On a day set aside to remember and honor King, with special events and discussions planned on campus, You, for the most part, slept in. Perhaps You were tired from the long weekend, or that Sunday night party. Perhaps You forgot what it meant the day he died, the deep sense of despair that must have overtaken the nascent dream of equality for so many African Americans. Or perhaps You had not forgotten; perhaps, instead, You felt it too intensely and did what President George W. Bush tells us all to do when the problems of the world seem insurmountable: You lived Your life as if nothing had changed.
Still, in all the 79 years the Time magazine award has been given, You have never gotten it before.
Not in 1944 when You stormed the beaches of Normandy, not in 1964 when You decided that maybe we could be a "Great Society" and not even in 1968, when out of the depth of grief among both blacks and whites a kind of fighting determination grew, a feeling that King's spirit and commitment should live on after his death, that an ever greater attempt should be made to achieve freedom and equality of opportunity for all people.
No, You received the Person of the Year Award this year, and I bet You did not even want it. Monday seems to have shown that fact.
At the Duke protest in 1968, most parents of the student activists were vehemently against their radical act, which history now labels brave. Now, however, there is no such discouragement; in fact, the University administration gives You a day to commemorate King's life and legacy. Yet not even that is enough to get You out of bed. And whether one sort of morality holds up against another, I do not believe Monday was the day, of all days, to sleep in.
So, perhaps it is right that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart referred to Time's selection of Person of the Year as "a joke," and that Slate Magazine labeled it as "just stupid." Because for all Your talk, You are oblivious to the issues we still face. You are oblivious to the problems of racism and sexism right on campus. Or You do not care.
Either way, this is how a dream dies. Not in stormy demonstration but in the triumph of the unconcerned, the can't-be-bothered and the spoiled. You have not only forgotten the man, You have forgotten his legacy.
Shame on You people of the year.
Andrew Tutt is a Pratt sophomore.
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