A little rebellion

Written by Carter Johnson
Thursday, 26 May 2011 00:00

On a drenched day in mid May, Howard Fineman, senior editor of the Huffington Post and former deputy Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, delivered the address at Colgate University’s 190th Commencement. I was seated in the drafty fieldhouse that day watching my sister begin her life post-university, and so had the privilege of hearing Mr. Fineman speak. His speech was called “Carrying the Torch in A Digital Age,” and his words contained both levity and gravity. It raised questions as important now as they were when he himself graduated from Colgate on a similar spring day in 1970.

Speaking openly and with refreshing candor, Mr. Fineman remarked, “In the 60s, our challenge was to deal with social change at home — racial and sexual — and a new global consciousness engendered by America’s post-World War II, superpower role… your challenge is to navigate in and lead in a digitally connected world.” And so while the challenges we face today differ from those of 40 years ago, the solutions we can use to fix these problems do not.

I am often reminded of a quote by Thomas Jefferson that I believe parallels these ideas of challenges and solutions. “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Jefferson wrote, and one can not deny the veracity of this statement. Indeed, without rebellion and protest, there is no change — the two have a connection that is universal and age old. Mr. Fineman spoke of how, in the turbulent year of 1968, he and his fellow classmates “occupied the administration building for three days. To protest what? ... fraternity discrimination.” He continued to say, “As a Maroon cub reporter, I wrote about silly pranks and fraternity rush. As editor-in-chief, I wrote editorials about Vietnam, Cambodia, the draft lottery and the first Earth Day.”

There is no doubt that we can learn from such local, community-based action — while it would be nice to think in terms of global change, in reality true progress is forged, at least for youths, in smaller, more concentrated undertakings. Mr. Fineman and his colleagues occupied administration buildings and wrote editorials and broadsides. Today our responses are to be found, perhaps, in a more modern realm, more reliant on technology and communication but no less demanding in the call for progress.

The value of an informed and questioning citizenry lies in self-preservation, the necessary evolution a society requires to survive is only achieved through constant dissent and protest of the sort Mr. Fineman and others practiced.

Age does not matter, for this holds true for teenagers and adults alike. What does matter is that the desire for change never dies, and that the will to progress is never hampered by matters of time and place.

Carter Johnson is a junior from Greenwich at Brunswick School.