One of my earliest, clearest memories at Harvard is of the evening of November 8, 2016. Hundreds of first-years were packed in Annenberg Dining Hall to watch live coverage of the 2016 election, expecting what the polls predicted: a resounding victory for Hillary Clinton. Initially, Annenberg was buzzing with excitement — eight years after the United States had elected its first black president, it seemed we were ready to make history again. I had turned 18 that August, making this the first election in which I was eligible to vote. I spent a moment taking a mental picture, imagining that one day I’d describe the scene to my own future daughter when she asked where I was the night that the first woman president of the United States was elected.
The polls, experts, and assumptions, it turned out, were wrong. As it slowly became clear that the tide was turning, my roommates and I headed back to our dorm to wait for the final results — which confirmed, at around 3 a.m., that Donald Trump would be the 45th president of the United States. On our walk home through Harvard Yard, we ran into friends, acquaintances, and strangers crying or simply sitting dejectedly, coming to terms with what the next four years would mean for our campus and country. The mood over the next few days was somber and heavy — it felt like Harvard was in a state of mourning.
In ways I’m not sure my class has always been conscious of, that cloud has continued to hang over us for the last three years. Trump has been president for almost the whole of my Harvard experience, and on a campus where many students are concerned with social justice, equality, and human rights, that political reality has been a consistent source of disappointment and anger. A barrage of negative news has weighed on our formative college years, and pessimism is the natural result. In classes, extracurriculars, and social gatherings, political discussions inevitably devolve with the sad recognition that our country’s collective future is being determined by an individual whom few Harvard students trust or respect. Even talking about Trump, at this point, is something of a cliché. And global news provides little respite: an international surge in xenophobia, nationalism, and right-wing authoritarianism makes the United States’ turmoil that much more frightening.
In this atmosphere, I’ve sometimes let myself slip into defeatism, spending more time bemoaning the status quo than imagining a brighter future. There is, of course, plenty to be sad about. But as I prepare to leave Harvard, I’m trying to gain as much wisdom and insight from what we all recognize is this school’s most important asset: its people. My most inspiring peers at Harvard are energized and excited; they are working to imagine, engineer, legislate, and lead better worlds than the one we have today. The most engaging classes I’ve taken here have asked me not just to uncover inequalities, but to imagine their solutions. During my sophomore year, I took a class with Dr. Cornel West. After his lecture one day, I waited to ask how he managed to stay optimistic in the face of so much inequality. He, in turn, asked me what other option there was. It is all too easy to intellectualize injustice, condemning it from our ivory tower without empathy or passion. West, though, recognized how meaningless this attitude is for the victims we purport to care about. We can’t make change without believing that change is possible; to build a more just future, we must allow ourselves to have hope. We must be knowledgeable, but also creative, enthusiastic, and warmhearted. Understanding what’s wrong is only the first step in creating a more just world, yet sometimes we seem to devote so much energy to this task that we have none left when it comes time to act. These insights, of course, are not unique to our Trumpian moment: Almost 1,500 years ago, the prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law Abu Bakr affirmed that “without knowledge, action is useless, but knowledge without action is futile.” At Harvard, we spend a lot of time analyzing, discussing, and dissecting the world around us. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better.
Image Credit: Unsplash / Micah Giszack // The Noun Project / James Kopina
