The Moment We Are In

To my friends, colleagues, classmates, and community members: It has been too long since I have penned anything for our paper. In that time, I have been neglectful in remembering the kind of outlet writing can be, so I write now to comment on the moment we are in politically and culturally — a moment of profound uncertainty where everyone senses something is giving way.

This past week, millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein were released and the criminal behavior that he — and so many world leaders, business figures, and influential elites — engaged in over the course of decades was exposed. For many, this was not shocking in the sense of surprise. It was startling in its confirmation: It reaffirmed what people have long suspected but rarely see laid bare, which is that accountability stops precisely where power begins. 

And yet, Epstein is not the whole story. He is a rupture that exists alongside a moment of deep social and civil division, alongside conflicts abroad that feel endless and increasingly normalized, alongside an economic reality in which the person working two jobs and still cannot make rent is criminalized — while worldly elites who engage in systemic and well-documented criminal behavior are quietly allowed to disappear from consequence.

In conversations with friends, family, and faculty, I often hear the framing that none of this is new — that there has never been a moment in history without injustice in some form. And that is true. But what feels distinct about this moment is not simply that crises exist, but that many of our institutions appear unable — or unwilling — to meaningfully respond to them, all while continuing to insist that patience, procedure, and dialogue alone are sufficient. That disconnect has a cost, and it shows up most clearly in a generation being asked to inherit the fallout.

If you are a student right now, you know this dissonance intimately. We are asked — sometimes gently, often relentlessly — what we are doing next, where we are applying, what path we are choosing. We are told, both implicitly and explicitly, that to make a difference, we must first make ourselves legible to existing systems. We are encouraged to refine our interests, optimize our resumes, and locate ourselves within narrow pipelines that promise “impact,” “change,” or “efficiency,” often without reckoning with whether those pipelines —consulting, finance, business, white-collar — can actually meet the scale of the moment we are inheriting. 

At the same time, at twenty years old, we are expected to be “finding ourselves” as if the pressure to plan our lives with precision is not happening against the backdrop of institutional decay, societal erosion, and a growing sense that the world we were prepared for may not be the one that endures. It is hard to describe what it does to a person to be trained for stability while living through instability. This, I feel, is a situation in which apathy is born. Apathy has become a defining feeling, not because students do not care, but because caring without leverage is exhausting. The last time large-scale, structural change was enacted via student organizing was over ten years ago now with the Amherst Uprising. When outrage is constant, and accountability is rare, withdrawal begins to feel like self-preservation. It is not that we have no opinions, nor are we all lazy thinkers — it is that we are surrounded by evidence that our views alone do not move the world.

I admit that I am not immune to this. I fall victim to the apathy, too. I scroll. I compartmentalize. I focus on what is immediately in front of me because it is the only thing I can touch with my hands. I tell myself I will engage more deeply later, when things feel clearer, and the path forward feels more stable. But clarity never seems to arrive. And the danger, I think, is not apathy itself — it is allowing it to harden into permanence, until dealing with it becomes not a coping mechanism but a worldview.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot at Amherst, where we talk constantly about “the bubble.” We say it like an inside joke, but the bubble is more epistemic than it is social. It shapes which kinds of speech feel permissible and which moral claims get dismissed as naive. Amherst gives people time — to read, to think, to encounter ideas, art, and history in a genuinely rare way. But that same insulation can also cultivate a political posture that is deeply risk-averse: one fluent in critique yet hesitant to commit, capable of theorizing suffering without ever having to remain close to it long enough to be altered. It produces a comfort with diagnosis paired with an unease around responsibility, where problems are endlessly named but accountability remains abstract.

There is a subtle but powerful pressure in higher education — especially at elite colleges and universities— to sound measured at all times, to be reasonable, to use the correct vocabulary, to anticipate every objection before making a claim, and to avoid genuine outbursts. We are, perhaps, positioned to speak in a way that makes it difficult to attack us, but in a manner that makes it difficult to hold us to anything. I worry about this deeply. When a culture places caution over clarity and neutrality over moral imagination, people stop expecting engagement to do anything real.

And on the rare occasions when someone asks the most honest question — “what do we do now?” — a kind of lull falls over the room. I recently felt that lull at a talk on democracy led by William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat. I do not say that to criticize the conversation one bit and if anything, the talk sharpened the very problem I am trying to name. It is also not that the room lacked intelligence or that the speakers lacked knowledge —  very much the opposite. Though when we reached the point where urgency could have forced us out of abstraction, there was a familiar gravitation back toward the safest answers. Dialogue, conversation, holding space or holding signs — they are important things, yes, though too often the only things we are willing to say or do out loud.

I want to be careful here. The ability to sit with people — especially across differences — is not trivial; it is part of what makes any society livable. Discourse should always be the first step, and often the first several. But history suggests that dialogue without pressure can slide into performance. Time and again, from labor reforms won only after strikes disrupted business, to civil rights concessions that followed sustained protest rather than polite debate, power has rarely shifted simply because it was persuaded. More often, it concedes because it has been compelled.

So when the only answer we can offer is “keep talking,” what we are sometimes really saying is we do not want to confront the problem of power directly or head on. We do not want to confront the fact that civility can become an anesthetic. We do not want to confront the fact that some systems are designed to absorb critique without changing, to allow dissent without yielding, and to convert moral urgency into manageable noise.

What I left Professor Sarat’s talk feeling the most was the reminder that uncertainty can’t be answered solely with intellect; it has to be met with faith. If Amherst is a bubble, faith is one of the few things that can pierce it. Faith alone, as I am feeling heavily in this moment, marks a refusal to reduce human beings to arguments and forces us to face the fundamental question of who we are becoming, and what we are willing to risk. Faith asks us to leave our comfort zones and pushes us beyond what we think we can do, which may allow us to better understand what we have in our wheelhouses; whether writing, speaking, organizing, volunteering, climate work, etc. In fact, I was appreciative of a mentor’s reminder recently that whatever your sphere of influence is, do the work you can do and be creative in what that looks like. So, the question I want to leave us with is not how to be optimistic, but rather what kind of people this moment requires and needs us to be? Because the system we have been prepared, have trained, and have learned for … may not be the one we are meant to serve in. Instead, we may be asked to help build something else much sooner than we thought.

So to my people: You are not broken because you are tired. You are not failing because you do not yet have a pristine answer to what comes next. You are not wrong for thinking with a moral lens and are not wrong to reject the idea that you shouldn’t be. This is a real historical moment, and it should feel heavy. But do not let the bubble convince you that earnestness is embarrassing or that moral seriousness is naive — it is highly necessary in this time. And if you do not know where to begin — which I don’t always know either — begin with the simplest discipline of refusing to go numb. Keep your faith close to you, whatever it might be. Let it guide you to action, not away from it. Let it make you braver. Let it make you honest. Let it make you willing, so when the moment calls for it, we can do more than talk.