As young college students, we seem to love raising our voices. We are very much inclined to vehemently attacking various notions about our outside world, that ‘big bad’ world beyond our safe haven bubble. Whether it’s a new policy regarding academic requirements, the status of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ or whether Snooki’s fist pumping contest reflected poorly on Binghamton University ‘ students want to be heard.

These contentions usually have certain underlying themes reflective of our various individual value systems. They tend to mirror our various beliefs and convictions about how the world should be run, each assuming a better ‘understanding’ than their opponents.

As I’ve begun to look at certain societal issues and their prevalence in our public debates, those such as distributive justice, war policy and immigration reform, I have attempted to deduce these issues to specific values as a method of determining what values are most pervasive in our political society.

Through this deduction, I have noticed that the values of liberty, freedom, peace, understanding and equality are those that are the most ubiquitous. They underlie almost all our basic desires and aspirations.

If virtually all of our contentions are essentially deductible to the same human values, then our dissensions must be rooted in the interpretations of these human values. If this is the case, how can we overstep these dissensions and eliminate the forces that disparage human unity?

While there are certainly meditation-based methods of killing the ego and exhibiting selflessness, I believe that we as a society must unite actively in universal ideals: a movement for peace, a movement for love and a movement for equality.

As John Lennon understood, an ‘intellectual’ approach to confronting these problems often disillusioned many individuals because of the dense, obscure political rhetoric that accompanied such a strategy.

I can attest that individuals can more closely relate to slogans such as ‘All You Need Is Love’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ then they can to dense political memorandums or pamphlets justifying why presented war policy X is better than presented war policy Y.

Idealistic claims such as these are often dismissed as lacking any understanding of the political climate. Moreover, these quixotic notions are often rejected as being reflective of my fledgling understanding of the world.

I ascertain, though, that this type of universal understanding and appreciation will be in the future. Although I’m not a biologist, I contend that this will be a future evolutionary form or state for humans.

Currently, we are immersed in an absurd system of unnecessary competition where survival remains an essential goal. I presume that individuals will eventually recognize this absurdity and eventually put forth a society where unity and coalition can sustain itself. The negative effects of this perpetual competition will eventually exhaust itself and this path will be the only way in which we can continue to exist.

I do hope that we can sidestep the initial steps of this progression by embracing certain notions of idealism, where idealism can become realism.