Sydney Life

What do you do when a Nobel Peace Prize winner reminds you how messed up the world is?

Every now and then at uni I get hit with the reality of things. At school you learn history, you learn to write essays, read poetry, maybe a language, or how the human body system functions. You also learn how to effectively regurgitate that which is expected of you, a task many hard working students are doing as I write.

But at University you learn how to think. Suddenly you are surrounded with a huge range of opinions; there is no right answer, and a thousand options. You can attend a philosophy class and argue away the existence of the chair you are sitting on, or join a campus political group and plan the Revolution. Whatever it is, you are constantly being challenged to come up with unique ways of looking at things and are pumped with the ammunition needed to do so. Yet with that thinking comes with a whole mountain of responsibility. You see as long as you are largely ignorant of all the world’s complexities and the problems that result from these everything is fine. But once you see them you are hit with a compulsion to do something about it. The enormity of the task, you inability to grasp it, or sheer laziness prevents you, and you are left with the shame of your inaction.

These are strong words I know. No doubt you have caught me in a momentary catharsis that will be broken shortly by my mobile blaring and a friend calling to “drag” me to the pub. That may even be the perfect place to take up such topics over a nice cold brew. And don’t get me wrong, I lap up this new knowledge. When else in your life do you have the leisure to attend talks, engage in debates, and generally devote time to hypothesizing about the future, life, and everything in it? Aside from the lecture I just returned from I have also heard the wisdom of a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Harvard lecturer on various topics of interest and import in the last few weeks. Gone are the days of being forced to go to classes, now I am actually trying to go to more! University is a time of choice… sure, you can chose to go there just to get a degree that will get you a job, or you can go there to study things that really make you tick and take advantage of the amazing resources at your disposal. Evidently my focus on politics, government and religion makes me more prone to contemplating the big questions. But if at high school I didn’t fully understand the seriousness of environmental degradation, or the hidden motivations driving war, I certainly do now and so my conscience comes knocking.

You can therefore look at this as an opportunity, which is aided by moments when the enormity of the task in front of us is overshadowed by moments of great hope. I’ll never forget a particular Political Economy class where we had to write our idea of the perfect society for the future. Each person came to the class with an entirely different, elaborately contemplative viewpoint. They were utopian for sure, idealistic to say the least. But I left the lesson feeling that if there were that many fantastic and innovative minds in a second year classroom, at one university, in one country, in the whole world…. then what potential there is for change out there!

“Just as despair can come to another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings"
- Elie Wiesel