We dupe ourselves into believing that the life of a college student is something to complain about, something real. These luxurious facilities we enjoy--our endless libraries, common-room fireplaces, special dinners in the dining halls--perpetuates the myth that academia leads to tangible goals, that it is somehow worthy in and of itself. We get huge rewards for our stress, thereby teaching us that these stresses are real, even when they are so disconnected from reality.

Certainly, everyone has heard these arguments before. But the way we compensate for this luxury may be even worse. We invent for ourselves a false liberalism--one of Foucault and excessively correct speech, not one of the inner city and poverty. We talk about past injustices, not about the ones happening today--ones we allow to continue. We talk about how to refer to female police officers, rather than how to make the police a more effective force. Newspapers write about racial diversity, but rarely talk about economic diversity.

This way, we can make some liberal-sounding noises without ever once bothering to end economic oppression, to solve the fundamental problems that cause real pain.

The residents of Boston and Cambridge know this. While we're taught that we deserve this idle life, they're taught that their children will probably never have a chance to enjoy it. They can't afford to send their children to great private schools, and they can't move to the suburbs, either.

Economic injustice and its symptoms will never end unless people in positions of power--or people like us, who will be--start to end these myths of academia, dispel elitist liberalism and turn back to reality. We have to realize both our complicity in the problem and our power to solve it. Racism isn't utterly incurable--it has real, definable causes which are themselves unjust and evil. By ignoring this fact we are committing injuries more grievous than those committed in South Boston, isolating ourselves from the reality we ourselves have created.

Treating the South Boston riot solely as a problem of race lets us ignore our culpability in the real problems of class.