Winter break is going to be only my fourth time home since January, and it's going to be my last time home until summer. I need to write my papers for Dean's Date; I need to get my life in order before I leave for Spain for the semester. I know it's my civic duty, but why can't it wait?
Being a college student tends to compress your worldview so that its focus extends about as far as the boundaries of campus. Especially as a Princeton student, it's hard to wrap your head around the concept that there is life happening outside of the Orange Bubble. If you asked me right now what my biggest concerns were, I would say school, my roommate, when I'm going to be able to get my cup of coffee this morning, when rugby season starts again, my friends and when I can fit a nap into today. This being the case, it's hard to understand how the government of California can be so insensitive as to assign me jury duty when I have papers to write
It is my civic duty, but sometimes it's hard to tell why what the California government does and says should matter to me. I barely even live there anymore. The decisions President Tilghman makes over in Nassau Hall will affect my life infinitely more, at least for the next year and a half, than anything Arnold Schwarzenegger does up in Sacramento.
That shouldn't be how I feel.
When we elected a new president last Tuesday, it was inspiring. I felt, all of a sudden, proud to be an American. It was a sentiment echoed by many of those I watched the results with. It became people's facebook .com status; it was sent in emails; it was a feeling that circled the globe. All of a sudden, we didn't want to dissociate ourselves from our country and what it did. But instead of only being inspired to participate and be good Americans when we feel like something momentous is happening, whether we like it or not, shouldn't we be like that all the time? And if we're dissatisfied, shouldn't we be paying attention and working to help institute the changes that we want to happen, instead of ignoring it all and sulking?
Now I will be the first one to admit that for the last eight years I found the Bush administration so distasteful that when it wasn't an election year, I was basically checked out of politics and world affairs. Perhaps that's just my personal negligence, but for those of us who aren't Wilson School or politics majors and don't aspire to be leaders of the free world, it's actually really easy to avoid all of that. Few things can get through the wall of Spanish novels, Shakespeare plays and unwritten pages of my junior paper that I've spent all semester building up. The temptation to check out and sink into my cozy self-centered world is there. But that's a temptation that should be avoided. It shouldn't take a historic election to yank me back to the surface. I should have checked back in long before the nth hour when I voted; when I went to work at a phone bank two hours before the polls started closing.
The point is, no matter how insular my world has become since I got to Princeton, no matter how much I feel like what happens outside of Princeton doesn't really happen, it does matter. The world can still reach us inside the bubble. It might not affect our daily lives, but it affects our future, our family, our friends. It may mean we have to do unpleasant things like jury duty, or that we inadvertently sign our name to policies that we disagree with, but some things are too important to check out on. We can't just opt out of world affairs just because we don't like what's going on.
Alexis Levinson is a comparative literature major from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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