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Opinion

Change begins with our generation 

Joshua Delano
Guest Columnist

I was walking to the University Center Satellite for a quick bite Monday and heard the blaring rap and r&b music. It was good, especially because they were playing some old-school Notorious B.I.G., but I had to stop when I heard the disc jockey announce the fraternity that had set up the booth was celebrating Literacy Week.

I thought it a bit of a paradox to be pushing Literacy Week while playing illiterate music. I like to write, I love other cultures and enjoy all kinds of music, but I think it is a joke to raise money on the premise of literacy while playing music that doesn't exactly correspond to the theme. Perhaps Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy would have been a better choice.

As college students, we are supposed to carry this country into the future. However, it looks like we are going to be the laughing stock of the world just like our bumbling politicians (such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and President Bush), continually stumbling along in incompetence, pushing education while not being able to formulate a complete sentence.

I am not saying that rap or any other form of expression should be stopped, but it seems like our generation is so lazy that we don't think. If we continue to be lemmings we will never see change. 

I was watching the brilliant television show The Boondocks the other day and loved the Martin Luther King Jr. episode. It pointed out how our nation is on the fast track to social degradation. Look where we have come from since King's period and where we wanted to go. Now look at how we have diverted from that path of equality and social justice by ambivalently ignoring historical happenings as we go about our day. Apparently we as a society have forgotten the great speeches of King and Malcolm X and are going to continue in our lax ways to turn from what is right to what feels good. 

Surely we aren't so apathetic that we do not have hope for the future. Sen. Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, and presidential hopeful John Edwards' speech about "two Americas" are not just flowery words said to raise the hair on the back of our arms with hope. We have to do something about it. We have to be the examples and leaders of tomorrow by beginning today. 

But we are becoming more segregated, lazy, ambivalent, apathetic and without a foundation of principle. 

We must stand tall and do what we know in our hearts and souls to be right and just. Don't follow the Pelosis and Bushes of the world, who hope no one notices that they are misrepresenting our principles and us. We can overcome the blunderings of the incompetent leadership of this generation with change, and it all starts with you and me.

Delano, a political science/history senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu