"Diversity and American Democracy." What does this mean? On September 29th, Cornel West tried to answer that question in front of some very young and naive Syracuse University freshman. As directed by West, the new Arts and Science students read a packet of information and essays that he provided, but which were extremely misleading. Going into the lecture with a negative and stubborn opinion, I was shocked by the intellect and thought process of Mr. West. This brilliant man quoted everyone and everything from the Bible to Walt Whitman and William Fualkner. Then he posed three challenges to us: deal with the wealth inequality in our nation, utilize the relative rules of caring and nurturing, and have the youth of today continue the democratic tradition for tomorrow. All of his challenges are obtainable and realistic goals if the youth of America band together and make some serious changes.

Mr. West's first challenge was to end the wealth inequality, which although extremely ambiguous, is absolutely possible. Mr. West believes in the old cliche, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Although the government would like to deny such a claim, it seems as though Mr.

West's third concern, the continuing of the democratic tradition, is the most difficult to predict, since it seems that the tradition has been so corrupted in the past few decades. Taking the view of a skeptic youth, I believe that there have been many incidents in history to show that greed and a lack of direction have overwhelmed the democratic tradition. The Vietnam War is a great example because the United States had no reason to get involved with a conflict between France and Vietnam. The United States wanted to play referee and it look how many of our men died in the process. Then with the Watergate scandal, it proved that our most trusted leader, the President of the United States, could not be trusted. The same sort of misuse of power occurred again in the 1980's, with the Iran-contra scandal. The most recent misuse of power occurred just recently with President Clinton and his numerous affairs during his time in public office. Cornel West believes that "the United States has always wrestled with its past mistakes," but it doesn't learn from them. The issue now is that the youth of today don't know where to take the democratic tradition because the only tradition that they have known has been a corrupt one.

West is right about this. With the wealthiest people owning all of the property and the businesses, it doesn't give people with fewer resources the opportunity to compete. I doubt that Bill Gates would ever allow any small business competition, even though it would never hurt the billion-dollar monopoly of Microsoft. Gates would just assume that Microsoft has all the technology and finance

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Approximate Word count = 1094
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)