 "Photo: Dominick Reuter")
Four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader said yesterday the biggest political crisis facing Americans is their own lack of civic involvement, citing inactive students as a thorn in democracy's side.
Nader chastised apathetic students at Boston University and called on them to vote in the 2008 presidential election.
"There's a great deal of apathy here at BU," he told 200 people in Metcalf Hall. "It's a generic deprecation of the human mind."
Nader told The Daily Free Press he will decide in a month or two whether he will make a bid for the presidency in the 2008 race.
The political activist has made solely symbolic runs for the White House in the past four elections - twice with the Green Party, once as a popular write-in candidate and once, in 2004, as an Independent. In the 2000 election, he was widely criticized for garnering votes that could have gone to then-Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat.
Nader has long criticized big corporations, saying they have too much power over politics. In his speech, part of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center's "Ready to Vote Speaker Series," Nader said apathy stems from the "corporate commercial culture" in which today's college students have been raised.
"We're not generating our own civic culture anymore," Nader said. "Start growing up civic and stop growing up corporate.
"Do not be ashamed of your idealism," he continued. "It's the background and source of all progressive reality."
Other leaders have echoed similar sentiments at BU this semester. In November, U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) joined Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore and professors Elie Wiesel and Howard Zinn in a call for student voting in the 2008 election.
Student activism at BU has been a discussion topic for several semesters, with many critics contrasting the campus's apathetic student body with the pupils who protested here in the 1970s. When introducing Nader, Gotlieb Center Director Vita Paladino discussed her activism days as a BU student during the Vietnam War.
"When I came to the campus, we had a lot of demonstrations," she said. "Young people then, we didn't really know what our future was going to be like."
Nader said although only 3 percent of college students were active in protests in the 1970s, it was enough to affect the outcome of the Vietnam War.
"Don't go through university without making a mark for a better world," he said. "Take on injustices. When again are you going to have your own newspaper, radio station, television station, free gathering halls?"
In the face of the "two-party elected dictatorship" of the Republican and Democratic parties, Nader said it is important to step away from associating with a party and instead shift focus to the individual candidates.
"Stop stereotyping yourself as Republican, Democratic, liberal, conservative, green, anarchist - whatever," he said. "People your age very often label themselves politically. They don't realize what cost that is involved in terms of closing minds and shifting away in order to suit a particular ideological position."
Nader said to be a "skilled voter," students must learn the candidates' issues and follow their track records as politicians.
"Being a skilled voter means doing your homework," he said. "Young people are suckers for celebrity status. You have to be much more demanding."
But everyone should vote, even if they are not well-versed in politics, Nader said.
"You can get along being a total amateur, because everyone else is," he said.
When a student asked Nader how to be politically involved without being labeled a rebel, he responded, "Don't give it a thought. The minute you give it a thought, you start censoring yourself."
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