It is a beautiful thing to express a conviction openly. It is an even more beautiful thing to live by that conviction.
It may be a positive thing for the University’s faculty to uniformly declare that military action in Iraq is wrong. This is assuming the majority of the faculty feels this way.
If such a declaration is officially stamped, it is possible that other institutions may follow suit. There is influence behind the voice of a university.
But regardless, if your stand is for or against military action, it is ultimately personal choice and not official declarations that will bring the peace that everybody wants.
There is a growing number of people who are willing to listen to ideas that would have been thought of as conspiracy theories not long ago. Particularly, the idea that oil — and ultimately power and money — is the primary reason that the U.S. has been so interested in the Middle East for the past few decades, if not longer.
This is precisely why charter signing, banner waving and marches are not answers in themselves. These things are part of an overall change and are important, but can only have so much effect.
If present and historical military action against Iraq is ultimately about controlling the flow of oil, then personal choice is the only real means toward peace. This nation, and increasingly the world, operates on a basic economical principle — supply and demand.
It is good to rally together and march peacefully against the war, but if we then get into our cars and drive home, we’ve effectively undermined ourselves.
It is just as good to make official declarations, but if the school itself is a wasteful consumer of oil — heating and electricity — then again we’ve undermined our own cause.
The supply of oil, and thus its sometimes violent and environmentally destructive acquisition, will continue until one of two things happens: Either it runs out, or we stop buying it.
The second is our personal choice, and it’s the most powerful statement we can make. If the school wants to make an effective statement against military action in Iraq, it should invest in solar, wind and other non-petroleum sources of energy to heat and light its rooms and bring life to its computers, mainframes and servers.
Wind generators and solar panels on the top of every building will make a statement that is far more powerful than charters and words. Encouraging students to ride bikes to school by providing a low-cost bike with tuition will also be a believable and practical statement. Encouraging students not to drive to school by offering some creative tuition reduction will give me reason to believe an officially declared stance.
If the response to these ideas is “It’s not cost effective,” or “It’ll cost too much,” then our officially declared statement is nothing more than words.