At Macalester, our lives are dictated by choice. We pick everything, from classes to culinary delights. This is a fundamental continuity for most students as we pass through an endless series of options: we chose to say “peace” to the womb and ever since we form our identity in a constant stream of precious agency. As picking and choosing becomes living and breathing, everyone becomes caricatures of themselves—made the same by the ability to be different. In turn, our whims and moods become intimately tied to issues of power, love and death—the stuff of politics. It is this choice that makes us slaves and makes others casualties of our leisure.

I’m not talking about abortion, or gay rights or any litany of very-important-yet-very-well-covered-issues on campus. I’m talking about that pain you feel in your stomach when you haven’t eaten in two days, the desperation when your childcare gets cancelled and you can’t go to work. I’m talking not about what you’ll choose to do when you can’t feed your family, I’m talking about what you’ll need to do. I’m talking about you because you, in all likelihood, are a Macalester student, and I, in all seriousness, am being ironic. I’m talking about the vast chasm between choice and necessity—the difference between the average Macalester activist and the average person he or she frequently claims to represent.

All y’all activists and self-anointed altruists speak with your choice because you have so little experience to speak of. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but problems develop as people become targets of activism instead of sentient beings with urgent needs. Inasmuch as this objectification happens, private liberal arts activism becomes de-humanizing—we talk so much about lofty theoretical sweet nothings and forget that a lot of people are reading eviction notices, not Foucault. Sure, let’s worry about endangered species and capitalism, but what about disenfranchised prisoners and emaciated communities of color? We could say that the radical yet very white and bourgeois Macalester approach ultimately addresses everyone, but by talking so big and doing so little it often addresses no one.

In spite of all my cryptic musings and gross overgeneralizations, it is comforting to know that I am surrounded by great people who feel compelled to do something about what irks them. I only ask that more politically active students step outside of this insular Macalester bubble and just listen—not study, not judge—just listen to people in need, especially before claiming to speak for them or their needs. It is only through this process that people who have been choosing all their lives can learn to stop and do what’s needed.