Courtesy of Lara Jameson / Pexels
By Alfonso Julián Camacho
A Perspective
It was another quiet day at Southwestern College.
There are too many quiet days at Southwestern College. Too many quiet lawns. Too many quiet hands scrolling trivia on phones. Too many “busy” people making no improvements in our community.
It is hard not to notice that our world has shifted. Infamous Epstein files hint at horrifying sexual misconduct by world leaders, yet no one in our country has been arrested. And our campus is silent.
ICE destroys families and murders activists legally exercising their precious First Amendment rights and our lawns are empty.
Venezuela is invaded, Iran is bombed, Cuba is strangled and our hands hold no banners.
Our wilderness is auctioned off to oil drillers and our voices are still.
It should not be like this. College campuses are breeding grounds for transformative ideas. Institutes of higher education must fight for freedom, liberty and justice.
Yet campuses are eerily quiet. Are we afraid? Have young people given up? Are we okay with the way things are?
Southwestern College could be a force to be reckoned with. We are a dormant dragon with the power to breathe fire. We are the closest college to the border. We are America’s most diverse college. We amplify the voices of immigrants. Every classroom, lab and hallway is filled with human richness.
Our campus is powered by hopeful brown and black faces—beautiful faces with aspirations and big hearts ready to do the work.
But do we know our voice?
Popping off online doesn’t cut it. Our modern life has trapped our voices in handheld devices. We follow people, we unfollow people without consequence. We are invisible to people in our flesh-and-blood community. We inspire practically no one.
Our devices are like crack—addictive, useless, debilitating. We need to pull our voices out of electronics and into real life. We need to meet our decision makers where they are, at board meetings and city councils. We need to tell them that in Imperial Beach one of our classmates is tailed by ICE because she looks brown. We need to scream that Southwestern students were left without their paychecks to support their families due to a reckless government shutdown. We need to advocate for our Jewish classmates who fear retaliation for acts they did not commit.
What stops us? For many of us college is a series of sacrifices like working two (or three) jobs, caring for family members or navigating disabilities. Minority populations like us carry extra tribulations.
So how can we make room for our voices? We must find a way. Student movements ended the Vietnam War, battle for gun control and insist that Black lives matter. Students have moved the political dial.
Southwestern College students can move it, too. We must find time and energy to raise our voices. We must find creative ways to elevate our ideas and use our college to drive change. Let’s fill our campus lawns with marching feet, our hands with banners and our voices with calls for justice and peace.
Our future is counting on us.
