A couple of weeks ago, I stopped by the George Sherman Union to get a sandwich from D’Angelo’s before coming into The Daily Free Press office for the night, and I was struck by a scene I observed.
As I was waiting for my chicken stir-fry sandwich, a girl standing about seven feet away from me was both talking animatedly on her cell phone and trying to place her order.
By gabbing about who knows what, her order may have gotten garbled, and the worker who was taking it, who did not speak English that well, asked her to clarify what kind of cheese she wanted.
The girl stopped talking, slowly removed the phone from her ear and with a face mixed with disdain and annoyance told him in a higher than normal pitch and volume of voice that she clearly said “provolone.”
While the worker went on making her sandwich, the girl resumed her conversation and said, with clear disgust in her voice, “Augghhh . . . these people don’t even know how to speak English.”
Obviously, I am not trying to stereotype all Boston University students as conforming to this kind of behavior, and do not think the character of our student body should be measured by one little tiff with a cafeteria worker. But what I witnessed did give me pause.
I think it offers a tiny window into the way we view the world, and the way we think the world should view us.
BU is supposed to be filled not only with exceptional international students from around the globe, but with a pool of the most highly-educated, informed and caring students America has to offer.
For the most part, I think this is true. I know first-hand from doing the First Year Student Outreach Project — both as a participant and a staff member — that there are a lot of students at BU who not only care about the critical issues facing the world, the country and Bostonians, but who also want to learn from and genuinely care about people different than themselves.
That said, are we as cultured, knowledgeable and compassionate as we could be? Let’s take a few examples.
Many of us probably went to go see Sacha Baron Cohen star in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan over the past few weekends and convulsed in the theater with laughter. I know I did. But did you know that Kazakhstan — the country Cohen says his TV journalist is from — according to an article published in Slate, is actually not very anti-Semitic and women there can in fact vote and drive?
Do you read The News York Times or the Boston Globe every day? I hope you do. It’s not just good for your political science or journalism grade, it keeps you informed. With coverage of the aftermath of the mid-term elections and the ever-increasing carnage in Iraq dominating space in the papers, the genocide occurring in Darfur has been obscured.
Do you know where in Sudan the Darfur region is? Or why the conflict is exacerbated by the difficulty managing refugees fleeing to Darfur’s neighbor to the west, Chad? Moreover, what are you doing to help stop the conflict other than gasping in shock about the greatest human tragedy of our generation over your morning no-fat, half-skim, tall caramel macchiato?
If I sound like I’m angry, it’s because I am. I’m angry with myself for not doing enough and angry at my generation for not knowing enough or not caring to do anything about these problems.
It has been said before, but apparently our parents’ generation overcompensated with the amount of protesting they did, so we don’t really have to get angry about anything. While our government is busy spreading democracy over there and fighting civil liberties back home, we content ourselves with buying the latest iPod Nano or keeping tabs on what Derek Shepherd is up to this week.
If this sounds trite, perhaps it’s because it has been said before and the message simply didn’t penetrate your white ear-bud-stuffed ears so it could get into your brain.
I’m not saying we have to save the world from global warming today. We won’t. And I’m not saying we have to halt global poverty by next week. We can’t.
But the least we can do is shut off our iPods, close pinkisthenewblog.com for the day, and take a genuine interest in the people and larger world around us.
Or, at the very least, maybe you will discover that the worker at D’Angelo’s is Haitian and needs you to speak clearly so he can help you.
Philip Goldstein, a sophomore in the College of Communication, is a Campus News assignment editor for The Daily Free Press.