As I enter graduation weekend for the second time in as many years, I am overcome once again with a mixed emotion of nostalgia for my past college years and a bit of anxiety for what lies ahead.
However, throughout my columns for The Daily Orange this semester, my anxiety has spread from narrowly focused concern about what job I would hold once I graduate to a more general concern about the future of our country.
Great things have happened in the five short years I have been a student at Syracuse University. We elected our first African-American president. The chief coordinator of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and many other suppressors of human rights have been eliminated. And we have been introduced to both Watson and Siri.
But at the same time, many more tragedies have struck. A skyrocketing economy in 2007 is now just a fragile shell of its former self. Wars we were promised to be out of still rage on while others loom around the corner. And innovators like Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson and Dick Clark died.
This semester, I have argued for and against numerous social and political positions in public policy. Sometimes, readers would provide me with praise, but more often, their feedback was less than complimentary. Still, I enjoy when this happens, not because I like to be confrontational but because I love to see the passion behind these replies.
In a world where partisan fighting in Washington, D.C., has not only stymied legislation but has also created a culture of young people who do not want to get involved in politics, it is great to see that some people do still care. However, too many others feel that the change they want is not possible to achieve and they regress to just giving up.
Today, the United States is beginning to lose its grip as the world leader in education, economic growth, innovation and military power. But worse, these positions are being threatened by countries that make it common practice to kidnap family members of those who speak out against government policies, countries that are led by dictators who have the sole objective of gaining nuclear weapons, not achieving economic stability or democratic elections.

In one of his most popular speeches, Jobs told Stanford’s graduating Class of 2005 the key to success is to ‘stay hungry and stay foolish.’ What he meant was to create change. You must be persistent but also have a touch of foolishness to believe you can do something when everyone around you tells you that you cannot.
As another class graduates into this unsure world, it is not a time to stop talking about politics just because things are getting too difficult. It is a time to start working harder to achieve our personal goals and those of our country. It is the time for those who are a little foolish, the ones Jobs called ‘the misfits. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.’ It is time to have passionate but frank conversations about the direction of our country.
In more ways than one, students in this year’s graduating class are different from any that came before. We are faced with many monumental problems to overcome, but we also have the new technological tools that are necessary to solve these problems. More importantly, though, we are oozing with creativity, energy and capability.
While some may see us as the crazy ones or the lazy ones, I see a group with the potential to find the solutions to our problems and create an almost unrecognizable world by the time our children are filled with their own anxiety about entering the real world from college – hopefully, not as much anxiety.
But this will not be easy. It will require hard work and an adjustment to our thinking that we are stuck in a world where what always has been will always be. ‘Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.’

Stephen Fox is a graduate student studying for his master’s degree in entrepreneurship and a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and finishing the program this year. His columns appeared weekly. He can be reached at smfox03@syr.edu.

Published on May 3, 2012 at 12:00 pm