Last week, Dear Old Dartmouth erupted with indignant rallies, shouting matches, and op-ed invectives, some even splattering our own pages. It must have been serious: surely, the Greek system must have faced some kind of severe reduction, or Parkhurst must have decided to cut the fencing team, or God must have turned all our beer into Fro-Yo, right? No, turns out all the fracas was over…immigration policy? What? How can we actually think of the others’ plights when Tubestock is fighting for its life?

Well, Tubestock is on the inside of the Dartmouth Bubble, and for awhile there, all of us were as well. Do you really remember the picketing, the rabble-rousing, and the pamphleteering crusades that enfolded the campus during the 2004 presidential election, touted as the most important of our time? I do—a few people outside the polling station at Hanover High on Election Day feebly waved signs (in all fairness, it was raining out). Sure, the respective political parties on campus mobilized with voter registration drives, literature drops, and some local door-to-door proselytizing—but none of this activism had any oh-no-you-didn’t bite to it.

But now this: classes canceled on account of conscientious inaction due to perhaps the largest Dartmouth rally in a decade, a “maverick” write-in candidate handily taking the SA presidency with a platform of cultural inclusivity and sexual assault awareness, and droves of Dartmouth students eschewing Daytona for Katrina over spring break. Add to these the recent fusillades of e-attacks across blogs and blitzes in a very Dartmouth venue of outcry, and we have, quite suddenly, real, even angry, activism. What gives? Why do we now, in 2006, feel ourselves called to action on a national scale?

Perhaps we can blame the freshmen, or say it all finally hit close to home (with The D’s rape series and the fall term Tulane ‘fugees), but I think TDI Executive Editor Jared Westheim ‘08’s theory on our rush to the battlements is the most viable, if also the most disappointing. Look what the lion’s share of campus debate has focused on during the Wright years: the Greek system, why our football team suddenly became so awful (hmm), the professor exodus, the banning of the pump tap, and the Greek system.

Hold on, though. SLI party regulations have slackened. Alpha Phi has arrived and the moratorium on new Greek houses is off (perhaps Zeta Psi next?). President Wright has turned the focus of his efforts to the new construction, and will probably be following Dean Larimore into retirement soon. Sure, some campus issues continue to flare up, but it’s hard to get your blood running red over trustee elections. Even the Review, bastion of campus contrarianism, recently toasted the college administration on its current direction. Christmas, it turns out, is saved after all.

I suppose we can be forgiven for doting on ourselves so much—it is indeed a small college, far away from Mexico and farther away from Iran, and few national iniquities carry the same visceral, here-and-now sting of being forced to compromise the only Best Four Years of Our Lives we will get. But at some point, not very long ago at all, we either got complacent or got what we wanted. And now with no perceived Evil Empire to rally against, we can all split into factions again and invest our whole indignant selves into tearing each other apart—hippies and high-horsers, mudslingers and mouthpieces—just like college kids are supposed to do. Who knew Dartmouth wasn’t apathetic this whole time? The rage was there all along—both kinds. One just had to be safeguarded for the other to be released.