Vers Libre: How to ruin your credibility as a peace advocate

Brenna Gilbert Opinions Editor

As evidenced by the labor rally on Thursday, Sept. 8, if there’s one thing Vassar students can do, they can get behind a cause. The protesting, the flyering, the heated debates in the Retreat—they all seem to suggest an ingrained social awareness. Yet at the same time here at Vassar, hypocrisy runs deep. Who determines what causes we follow? Do we think to address the same issue we’re screaming about one day for the rest of the year? Think back to last year around election time with the anti-war protests or the controversial picketing of the Army recruiters. We, as a campus, appear to condemn violence and our country’s involvement in it. We’re rated as one on the top liberal schools in the country. So where is our true commitment to ending violence, particularly drug-related violence, a violence to which we directly contribute?

Putting aside all of the physical effects of drugs on your body, consider what the use of hard drugs does to both your credibility and moral fiber. How can you expect to be a convincing voice in the outcry against war when you are fueling a war all on your own? This war may not be the popular darling of the media, yet it is very real and very deadly. If you want to advocate peace, advocate the end of the liberal elite’s lenient approach to drugs and finally take an all-encompassing stand against the things you already claim to condemn.

I remember the first time our hypocrisy hit me. Last year around the time of spring break, a group of my friends were making a plan to drive to Mexico when a friend from Texas told us that drug disputes along the border made it too difficult to travel there safely. “People have been murdered and kidnapped, especially Americans,” he cautioned. Ignoring the typical American ego-centrism of that comment for a moment, let’s consider the implications. Innocent people, women and children who have never had a moment’s involvement in the drug trade other than the unfortunate location of their home, are dying every day in the violence that surrounds the production and exportation of drugs. I’m not talking about a little marijuana grown in someone’s shed in Vermont; I’m talking about the international drug trade.

The worst part about it is that until people stop using hard drugs, this war will continue. It is a struggle fought entirely on a personal level, dependent on the strength of our generation’s character. If we begin to address drugs as less of a social problem and more of global concern, the true impact of the fleeting experience will become apparent.

It all seems so far away and foreign—the Colombian rain forests, the death squads, the frightening history of U.S. military involvement; yet it is right here in our own backyard. In drug and alcohol polls on campus, a surprising number of students admit to using hard drugs; a little over ten percent of Vassar students had used cocaine in the last two months. It is absolutely socially and morally negligent to believe that the use of those drugs is somehow separate from how they got here in the first place. We sit here in the fortress of our wealthy liberal school and condemn Republican warmongers. “War shouldn’t be a tool for selfish interests in oil or exporting democracy,” we cry angrily. “The war in Iraq is a symbol of all that’s wrong with this country.”

Nay, my friends, what’s wrong are liberal peace activists who sit by and allow their friends to do drugs, an action with enormous legal and social repercussions. No wonder college students are not taken seriously! We champion peace with our right hand and cut lines with the left. Well guess what, Vassar—using hard drugs contributes directly to the deaths of innocent human beings, and its time that we take responsibility for our own actions and the actions we condone through our silence.