Upon arriving in college or simply watching the movie \PCU,"" one spots a certain breed of college personality commonly known as the activist'young idealists who think one person can change the world and that change can and should be immediate. Their common traits include a bright smile, a decent sense of humor and a prejudice that their own beliefs are a self-evident truth, in little or no need of any rhetorical defense. Those who read the opinion pages of the Cardinal, the Capital Times or that other college paper should know what I'm talking about. However, in my own experience I have found that nothing dispels these notions quite like real work in politics.
Some months ago, I went door-to-door for a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin State Assembly. Though he ran a spirited campaign and was clearly the better man for the job, he lost. One can still find a sticker for 1998 Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin Ed Garvey adorning a banister on some steps outside Bascom Hall, regardless of his failure to receive even 40 percent of the vote.
For conservative readers, the 2001 Republican nominee for governor in my native New Jersey was quite arguably the intellectual superior of the two candidates, and one would be hard pressed to think of a moment where he may have said something he didn't mean 100 percent. After a landslide defeat, he's back in the private sector. The political graveyard is filled with also-rans who mistook their own internal dedication to principle for actual merit as a candidate, and soon were in need of a new job.
I have resolved to spend more time working for my party this year, and a few days ago spent two hours alone in a room labeling and then stuffing envelopes, inarguably a menial task.
Go to any political party or campaign office, and similar work will be found. For every one part ideas, there are a hundred more parts of small, seemingly inconsequential tasks to labor away in while others shape policy, all in the hope that one might eventually become one of the latter people. The natural order is not one of ideals and instant gratification, but hard work, patience and perhaps results after a million little and large setbacks.
Contrast this reality to most college activists. They spend their time in marches or at tables on Library Mall and a variety of other places, trying to build ""grass-roots"" support, meaning they wish to change the world without actually doing anything first or building any coherent agenda or policy. When they do claim a success, the public would have been better off with them failing than their half-baked policies, such as out-of-control student organization budgets that don't serve any obvious or immediate purpose. (Why, exactly, do the UW Greens have an expensive corner office at University Square, paid for by seg-fee money?)
The natural order mentioned above is probably for the best; one cannot claim access to eternal truth by fiat and then expect results, without much grounding in the ways of real world institutions or civil discourse.
Myself, I recognize my own insignificance, my own inability to automatically claim that I am right and deserve to be listened to and followed. Instead, I'll be at the state party office, stuffing envelopes, perhaps phone-banking and doing the myriad of other tasks that are part of maturation in the political sphere. After all, besides the beer, we're all here at college to learn a thing or two.
