Our Take: Staff Editorial
Problems and Hope
By: Chips Staff,
February 16, 2012
When a big name in journalism like Pulitzer Prize-winning Nicholas Kristof comes to campus, we newspaper nerds down in Chips get pretty excited. In case you missed his credentials, the guy has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 140 countries, all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He’s seen wars, caught malaria, survived an airplane crash and has seen an Indonesian mob carrying heads on spikes.
Needless to say, we were not the only ones on campus excited to hear from this world traveler. Imagining the experiences Kristof has had, the variety of his intercultural experiences and the wild encounters he’s weathered, it is even more striking that among these things, gender inequality is what struck him most deeply. In fact, it struck him so deeply that he calls it the ethical dilemma of our generation, likening it to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.
Kristof has met girls and women with gouged-out eyes, full-body burns, painful and life-threatening internal tears called fistulas, girls left out to die after giving birth, starving girls with healthy brothers and scores of other injustices that are the direct result of misogynistic societies and indifferent individuals.
It is easy to get bogged down in the hopelessness of it all, the inhumanity of these unwarranted punishments. But Kristof also offers glimmers of something different in his book “Half the Sky” – tales of success, hope for a better tomorrow, and actions that we can take, right here on campus, right now.
With so many students returning from eye-opening, even life-altering study abroad experiences, this is the perfect time to reflect on the interconnectedness of the beautiful, broken world we inhabit. It’s all too easy to let the lessons learned overseas become isolated experiences, trapped in the past and floating somewhere in the back of your mind between the onslaught of classes, homework and activities. We urge you to pause what you’re doing for ten minutes – quicker than a Facebook break – to look at the websites below. Some solicit donations, and if you’re able to give financially that is an excellent way to make a difference. Others simply put you on a mailing list to keep you informed about these issues, and awareness is free of charge.
In the question-and-answer session following Kristof’s lecture, he was asked why we should get involved with these far-away problems.
“When you’ve seen a girl’s eye gouged out, you don’t ask that question,” Kristof said in his lecture.
Don’t get caught this semester living in the Luther bubble. There’s a world of problems – and hope – waiting just outside.
