“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”

The quote was said by one of our most famous founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. And although it was spoken over 200 years ago, the message is still applicable today.

The world has changed slightly since the time of Thomas Jefferson, and so has the youth of America.

Young people now live in a sort of bubble, a controlled environment called college. We permeate our brains with information five days a week and our livers with alcohol the other two (well, this ratio may slightly differ from person to person). We carry out our lives one day at a time. We go to class, we study, we socialize. The weekend eventually comes and goes and we do the same monotonous routine over again. Once in a while something exciting may happen that gets people excited and reminds them that they are in fact living, breathing human beings.

I don’t want to generalize, but for the sake of this column, I simply must. College students live in an artificial reality. I know because I have witnessed it firsthand. We all get out of touch with the world sometimes. We’re in college, it’s inevitable. But the underlying problem in our generation is that young people have the misconception that things don’t affect them, that they don’t have to care about politics and current issues, and that somehow everything will fix itself. Or better yet, our aging politicians in Washington will fix it for us.

Well, I hate to tell you, kids, but it doesn’t work like that.

Newsflash: this is college. The word may mean different things to different people. For many students at Ohio University, “college” seems to mean an endless booze-fest. These four years of our lives are supposed to be a time for growing and developing our intellect and character. After these four short years, when again will we have such easy access to such a wealth of information and culture? This is your chance to act and you are passing it by.

If college students want to be taken seriously, they need to start taking themselves seriously. We need to stop thinking that we are the center of the universe. We need to start understanding that our actions—and inactions—have repercussions. And we need to start believing that we have the power to shape our own futures and influence society.

But it isn’t going to happen if students are not cured of the terrible disease I like to call apathy. “Students are not apathetic!” you so boldly protest. Oh, but they are.

How many college students actually vote in local elections? What about the primaries? Or even presidential elections? How many students read a newspaper daily? And I don’t mean The Athens NEWS, The Post, or The Athens Messenger. How many students can actually say that they watch the news? No, the Daily Show and Colbert Report don’t count. I mean real news. Instead of spending five minutes to catch up on what’s going on in the world, college students instead spend countless hours in a fantasyland of sports, reality TV shows, video games, and fashion magazines.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. What’s wrong is that college students are more informed about their favorite celebrities and sports figures than they are with the politicians that claim to represent them. No matter how much you insist, Britney Spears’ latest scandal or the statistics of last night’s baseball game don’t really affect you. And no matter how much you try to convince yourself, the world is not going to come to an end if you don’t watch the newest episode of Desperate Housewives or if the Browns don’t win the Superbowl (well, the latter has already been proven true).

I think it’s time that college students had a reality check. The 2008 presidential election is just over a year away. There are major issues at hand that will affect us all; healthcare, Social Security, the Iraq War, foreign policy, abortion, and gay marriage are just a few. If we fail to act and make decisions for ourselves, our futures will be dictated by the voices of others who are brave enough to do it for us.

Don’t let your parents, professors, or the media tell you what to believe. Decide for yourself. I know that students have opinions. I know that students have voices of their own. It’s about time we start using them, and using them in an intelligent, meaningful, and responsible way.

So take Thomas Jefferson’s advice. Get informed. Join a club or organization. Submit a letter to the editor. Hold a protest or rally. Pass out literature. Start your own newsletter. Write your state or local representatives. Do something. Act. You will be surprised at how much you are capable of—and what we are all capable of together.

Emily Mullin is the Campus Report Online correspondent at Ohio University of Athens.