Students bring perspectives from afar

-- Rumu Das Gupta: From left: Amanda N. Brown, Sandine Holloway and Marcela HernándezWhile wide agreement was the order of the day among the more than 800 who attended the July 11-13 Convention for the Common Good in Philadelphia, one college contingent, three women from Georgian Court University in Lakewood, N.J., had a different vantage point from many at the gathering. And they took home some different points of view.

Two of them, Sandine Holloway, a senior, and Marcela Hernández, a graduate student, are from Jamaica and Honduras, respectively, so the convention for them was less about what they might do as voters than gaining a deeper understanding of how and whether U.S. politics delivers on U.S. ideals. Amanda N. Brown, a self-described “military brat,” was “offended” at some of the criticism of the Bush administration and of the Iraq war voiced during the proceedings. She said her father had spent time in Iraq and had spoken of working successfully with returning refugees.

Brown, a junior and president of her class, and Holloway, a senior and student government president, both said they felt at times that the majority older crowd was inattentive or dismissive of what they had to say. Yet both (and they all could rattle off the mission of the Mercy sisters, who run Georgian Court and were a cosponsor of the convention) said they were inspired throughout the day by talk of the common good. Brown said the idea was “crystallized” for her in thinking that what an individual purchases, for instance, can have a global effect.

Holloway said that even though she can’t vote, she wanted to take back to campus “a sense of urgency” about “the simple idea” that other students have the right to vote “and have to use it.”

Hernández, who felt her opinion was valued in a caucus on leadership, said she believes that to the idea of respect for individual rights should be added the idea of equality.

Holloway said: “The word we use most is ‘I.’ We should use ‘we.’ ”

National Catholic Reporter August 1, 2008