The hope of politics

This is the most vigorous campaign season in living memory. Living at Duke you wouldn't really know.

There's the obligatory Barack Obama worship, of course, which emerges once you scratch the surface. Every once and a while you're confronted with someone who supports the laughably terrible candidate Ron Paul, who represents the worst parts of 1920s conservatives and 1990s conspiracy theorists in one curmudgeonly bundle. Most students are reasonably well-educated about the election. But there's a lot of silence on campus about politics, except in the abstract.

I see a lot of explanations for this. Most politicians talk about middle-class issues like income taxes, health care costs and unemployment. Most people at Duke don't have to worry about these things-we're either too young or too rich for them to matter. The war in Iraq is a distant, slowly receding problem, and few people who have not already joined the armed services will ever have to fight there. Aside from mild irritation at President George W. Bush's foot-in-mouth disease, most of us don't have a particular practical motivation to become political pundits.

And, I suspect, most people our age feel totally alienated by politicians. There is a widespread view-and not just among people our age-that political campaigns are a chance for about a dozen people to scramble for millions of dollars in campaign contributions. As this thinking goes, these campaigns have nothing to do with average people, and the huge contributions received from corporations ensure that regular people will have little say in the decisions politicians make after the elections.

This view leads people our age to support in droves the candidates who seem to buck that trend. There's Paul, who bucks every trend in politics, and because of it has acquired an undeserved reputation for integrity. Obama, of course, constantly talks about changing the way politics work, and his life story is certainly radically different from that of your average old, white, male president. And so both these men receive the lion's share of young people's support. But beyond that support, our political involvement remains limited, even when it comes to voting.

That's emblematic of what's wrong with our generation's view of politics. The political process is not just about individual personalities or presidential campaigns, no matter how long they drag on. It's not about the avalanche of polls and stump speeches regurgitated by the press every day. The way I see it, politics is about identifying problems and then finding ways to solve them. Our government and politicians are a means to that end.

The great political issues of our nation, from the gay rights movement to urban poverty to the national deficit, will not be solved by opinion polls or joining Facebook groups. They will be solved by people taking actions that have real results. The most basic of these is voting. The most extreme is actually holding office. In between are nearly infinite opportunities to create positive change, from becoming active in community organizations to volunteering to just talking to people about the problems our country faces.

What I'm trying to get at here is that there isn't a real difference between politics and the sort of activism in which Duke students regularly take part. The major difference is scope. The political campaigns we scorn are often made up of the efforts of thousands of people to create a positive, real and lasting change for the better in America. By embracing those we agree with, instead of blowing them all off, we can be a part of that process. I think that's pretty exciting, and the vast options with which we're provided for accomplishing things for this country in 2008 are downright electrifying.