To the best of my knowledge, there are approximately zero people in our country today who hope to become nothing more than dedicated and dutiful civil servants. The brightest today who are at all interested in public policy would much more swiftly declare that activism of some sort, any sort, is a more noble and effective form of enacting change than is becoming a government cog.

Somewhere recently down the line, Americans decided that government is so defunct that the best and most moral among us should avoid it, if not actively oppose it. Activism is the prime civic engagement of the day.  

Few things spur activism more quickly than seeing our First Amendment rights tampered with. These rights are lodged in our cerebellums, primed for deployment with equal force when faced with a brutalizing police squadron or when at a cocktail party.

The First Amendment rights supply virtually all the necessary elements for activism. We have developed new tools to facilitate activism, but we haven’t needed to create new constitutional provisions to protect activists in the modern era. The most important of protections are snuggled in that nugget of text, which stands like a sentinel at attention between angry mobs and governments that overstep their boundaries.

But in recent years, this model of the First Amendment as a protective element against tyrannical regimes has been eclipsed: We’ve started to treat it far more like a call to action than a safety net.

Exercising First Amendment rights ought to mean that in the face of opposition, one resorts to those unassailable safeguards. Instead, those rights have become the impetus for exercising them. In the same way that school boards and the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company must use every last drop of funding they are given, even if wastefully, just so that their budgets aren’t cut in the next quarter, simply because First Amendment rights exist, people believe they are obligated to demonstrate their use.

More importantly, a large number of activists today believe that exercising one’s First Amendment rights is in and of itself morally good. Before asking what the instrumental goal of an activist’s actions are, people give nods of approval to their activist colleagues simply for being against the system. I can see how counterculture for the sake of counterculture can be praised in a field like art, but when it comes to our peaceful coexistence, this mantra just seems counterintuitive.

Some argue that we live in a better society today because we praise individual protest as good in itself. But even if this could be proven true, it would convince me more of our fundamental inability to create stable governments than in our ability to enact change. Being an activist is not a badge of honor. It is a reminder that men and women, two hundred years after the Constitution of the United States, a thousand years after the Magna Carta, and four thousand years after Hammurabi’s code, still cannot manage to live together in peace.

James Wilson, my founding father heartthrob, originally argued in favor of a constitution that had no Bill of Rights, saying that, “it would have been superfluous and absurd” to note that “we should enjoy those privileges of which we are not divested.” He did not mean that he had helped create a government so infallible that it could not harm its citizens, but rather that a bill of rights, in delineating certain acceptable actions, might actually make people forget that the freedom of expression is a birthright and not an instruction manual. Today we are so obsessed with the instruction manual that we have forgotten the machine. 

In the long run, it is not the support for particular causes, but adherence to a sustainable set of laws, which binds diverse populations together. So rather than eschew establishment because of its apparent dysfunction, perhaps we ought to stand with it now more than ever.

Vivek A. Banerjee ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.