Through the years, DePauw has been lucky enough to have prominent speakers from today's society and culture come speak to our community. In the past academic year alone, Martin Luther King III, Ron Paul and Harry Belafonte have visited campus. On March 2nd, we will host Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS.
No matter the details of their speeches, the essential message our guests bring is the same: be a force for beneficial change. These speakers often follow up by challenging our generation to facilitate this change.
However, this editorial board is worried that our generation is too easily distracted to bring the change to which we are called. With social media, the news media and even the speakers themselves bringing new issues to the forefront every other week, few of us pay any prolonged attention to any one problem. We pick up social movements as if they were fads and set them down again when the next injustice screams for our attention. We seem to think that a share on Facebook or our 140-character tweet is enough to do the job. This is not true. Real social change takes dedication, years and more than a few hundred Facebook "likes".
In the last few years, many of us on this campus have participated in movements such as Kony 2012, the "Live Strong" campaign and Occupy Wall Street. Despite how these movements may have ended, the fact of the matter is this: many of us participated in and nearly all of us recognized these movements for the three weeks to a month that they held our attention. When they were no longer in the spotlight, we let them fall into the shadows.
That is exactly the problem. A social movement can only actually help us move forward if we give it our attention for more than a few weeks or a month.
We are extremely excited for Blake Mycoskie to share his vision and his mission of "change for tomorrow" with this campus. Our worry is that listeners will take it to heart in the moment, but quickly move on.
To sustain any type of movement and to make change, you can't just have the passion, you need to have the motivation to see things through. As an editorial board, we see individuals on this campus with this motivation and we applaud them. We also hope that the rest of us can follow their lead.