Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 24, 1994                   TAG: 9405240041
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PEACENIKS?

In an orgy of impassioned rebelliousness, hundreds of Virginia Tech students closed down a major campus thoroughfare on a cold afternoon in 1990, delaying traffic and keeping local police officers busy for hours. I was a reporter for the Tech student newspaper at the time, and from our office window I was one of the first to see the angry crowd gathering outside Cassell Coliseum. It created an image that was a throwback to the famous - or infamous - student activism of a previous generation.

Not knowing exactly what was happening or why, I took my pen, notebook and blissful ignorance with me and ran to Washington Street where the crowd was - assuming that events in the Persian Gulf and the possibility of war had caused many students to abandon their classes for the streets.

I was wrong. It wasn't because of war. It was because of a football game.

Moments before the student demonstration, Virginia Tech had sold out of tickets for the upcoming Tech-UVa game, leaving the students enraged and leaving me with a helluva spot-news story, a few scrapes and bruises from being in the middle of an angry mob and a strange feeling about the somewhat selective apathy of my student brethren.

Apathy notwithstanding, I believed then - as I do now - that most college students are extremely concerned about social issues, and that their concern and subsequent activism is often the catalyst for social change. However, as I learned that afternoon in 1990, many of today's college students do seem to care more about things like football than social issues. And like the police officer at the scene, many people don't understand it.

Are "these college kids" a lethargic and complacent product of the Me Generation? Do we have a bad attitude? Are we just plain lazy?

Maybe. Then again, maybe sometimes we would just rather watch two schools play a football game than watch two nations go to war.

So what the heck is wrong with that?

KEN DAVIS

SENIOR

VIRGINIA TECH