For those of you who missed Kirk Smith’s letter in the Daily which appeared the Friday before spring break (Mar. 7), I urge you to find it and read it. No one can doubt the earnestness and passion with which he offers his views on campus activism. It is a perspective that surely invites hearing. For myself, I have a somewhat different take on what has been happening, and that is that social movements always have been and continue to be crucial to our society’s well-being.

Fifty years ago a Swedish sociologist named Gunnar Myrdal held a mirror up to our society with a book called The American Dilemma in which he pointed out our country’s failure to live up to the American creed. We preached equality for all, he said, but we practiced white power and privilege.

Forty years ago, a social movement seeking to resolve this American dilemma began under the leadership of a group of African-American Christian ministers. Our failure to live up to the creed we touted, they said, was a violation of our founding documents — indeed, a violation both of our Bill of Rights and of the Judeo-Christian scriptures.

Thirty years ago, this movement for black civil rights gave life to a whole array of social movements: a student movement, a peace movement, a women’s movement, a Latino movement and an American Indian movement. Twenty years ago, these were joined by movements of the elderly, the disabled, and gays and lesbians.

The cumulative effect of these and other movements has been to greatly enlarge democracy — to extend the vote to those who were voteless; to change the faces of our major political parties; to admit into the halls of policy making people of color and other women who until 20 or 30 years ago were largely silenced and invisible.

But that participation is still far from perfect and the American creed still stands as an ideal that we have yet to fully realize. If we, as a nation, are to become all that we can be, “we, the people” — and especially today’s generation of youth — must carry on this very American tradition of seeking to resolve the American dilemma.

We continue to be challenged, not to “tolerate” difference but to celebrate it, to honor it and to assure its full representation in our economic, political and educational institutions. In meeting this challenge, we may find ourselves one day fully practicing what we have long preached. And in that moment, we will have become one people, united, with liberty and justice for all.

I can only celebrate when I witness young people learning to organize and committing themselves to resolving what they perceive to be circumstances of injustice. Envision, alternatively, an America devoid of such activism. The spectre of totalitarianism is not far removed.

Mary Sawyer

Associate Professor of

Religious Studies