Popular Causes and How College Students Promote Them

Being a child during the 1990s, my main exposure at the time to trends of popular causes was lessons about the rainforest. Being on a liberal east coast college campus in the late 2000s of course sheds light on a variety of the new popular causes, such as HIV/AIDS. In contrast to the olden days of protesting the world's ills with witty picket signs, sit-ins, and Bob Dylan songs, though, college students have new, innovative ways of tackling big issues without leaving their campuses, or even their rooms.

A list of popular causes on my campus, and how students contribute to them:

* The environment, by focusing on "green" shopping bags, cleaning products, reusable water bottles, household decorations, etc., organic food, and wearing expensive t-shirts made of organic cotton, which is slightly less wasteful of petroleum than non-organic cotton. 

* Fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa by purchasing CDs, t-shirts, coffee and paper goods whose producers send a small portion of the profit to organizations that provide medicine/counseling to HIV/AIDS patients in Africa.

* Protesting the genocide in Darfur through many of the same means used to fight HIV/AIDS without actually providing direct aid.

* Fighting global poverty, especially in Africa, by buying beaded necklaces and signing online petitions pre-written by ONE.

* Organizing very big, expensive dances with student activity/club funds and donating the ticket proceeds to a particular cause.

* Handing out plastic water guns with local fire fighters to symbolically extinguish poverty, as opposed to giving club money to a prominent NGO or financially-challenged schools.

* Paying for expensive speakers to tell the students that things in [name a country with major economic/health/social/political/religious issues] are really bad, but we are trying really hard to fix things up… would you like to buy the book I wrote about the process?

Call me cynical, but I think there are better ways to fight AIDS, poverty, and help the earth than buying expensive t-shirts.