Sometimes, events outside the bubble of the college world demand not only our attention, but also a fundamental reckoning of our position and privilege.

The current Mediterranean refugee crisis, a product of turmoil throughout the Middle East and North Africa, is one of those times.

Many of us who follow humanitarian crises are familiar with gruesome imagery, and each of us knows― even if we do not dare to say out loud― that often what goes uncaptured by camera is far worse that what is. The picture of a Syrian toddler, found drowned and washed up on a Turkish beach after his family’s boat capsized at sea, makes me think of the life that this toddler could have lived. He could have had an education; he could have been an advocate; for all I know, he could have been just like me. He, as an individual, was collateral damage from a war; a single water molecule in a seat of tears. Tim O’Brien devotes an entire chapter to the life someone could have lived in his wartime novel, The Things They Carried: the narrator makes up physical attributes and a psychological profile as he attempts to imagine himself as the man he didn’t need to kill, in a futile attempt of mourning and repentance.

According to a Sept. 5 VOX article, almost 20 million people across the Mediterranean region have been forced to flee their homes; approximately 42,000 join their ranks daily. From Syria alone, according to a Sept. 11 CNN report, 6.5 million people were forced to flee their homes and an additional 4.1 million were forced to leave the country entirely.

It is impossible toon an individual level―comprehend the mass loss of innocent life in a war zone. The saying goes that one death is a tragedy; 1 million is a statistic. The same holds as well for refugees and displaced persons―except that we have a chance. Thankfully―and partially due to the Pope’s urging―countries such as Germany and the U.K. are beginning to house refugees, and the U.S. government announced just a few days ago that it will lift its current cap on the number refugees it will house, offering to accept 10,000 more over the next year. Indeed, German chancellor Angela Merkel recently said there is no legal limit on the number of displaced persons her country can accept: which means that chiefly, this is a problem of political will.

But it is possible to recognize our relative isolation from this tragedy, and that is the first step we must take.

We in the west are the opposite of the children on the rafts. We have families. We have a home. We have a purpose, a future and a plan. Yet we are the same; we can imagine ourselves on these boats.

We don’t need to imagine a historical scenario, especially here at Brandeis. Easily, instinctively we can relate what’s happening today to how the international community treated the S.S. St. Louis in 1939, a ship full of refugee Jews that was rejected by every single country it stopped in, including the U.S., only to be sent back to Nazi Germany. Members of my family passed through Ellis Island, where they read Emma Lazarus’ enduring poetry of the American promise: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”; my great grandfather’s eleven-year old graffiti can still be found in the Ellis Island Museum. So many of us come from families or cultures with an immigrant and refugee history; indeed for many of us a fundamental commitment to social awareness and social justice is what brought us to Brandeis in the first place.

But what can we do? I ask this as an idealist; I demand this as a cynic. The central dilemma we face while in college is how to best spend our limited resources and limited time, even as human rights and human dignity are things we must always pay attention to.

The sad answer―and also the obvious answer - is that there is nothing sufficient. I can do, or you can do. My power as an individual is minimal, if not nonexistent.

But we can take collective action. It may be incremental, but it will be noticed. One constituent letter is tragically ignored by an intern; one million become a statistic, and elected officials will take heed. On Sept. 19, there is a vigil for the refugee families that will be held at Copley Square in Boston. I looked at the Facebook RSVPs for this event, and I discovered that many were from college students―

more than a few of them Brandeis students. But it reminds me still of the debate that’s played out in my head, between the idealist and the cynic.

What even is the utility of attending such an event, the cynic might ask?

The idealist responds that something must be done, even if it is only symbolism.

The cynic says that the idealist is doing something simply in order to make him or herself feel good.

The idealist retorts that there are things so much bigger than the individual egos at stake.

This conversation becomes circular very quickly. It is easy to see efforts by college students in situations such as these as futile, self-aggrandizing gestures. They are not. Political awareness is an act of empathy; collective action, a sign of shared humanity.