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A new set of names will appear in the staff listing on the previous page in August, just as it does every year.

Likewise, the newspaper will take on a slightly different persona, just as it does every year.

But next year’s staff of students and host of readers will be in a unique position, one of reflection and renewal that is important to helping us make sense of the world around us.

This term ends on a sour note: not the high one that students often hit at the end of another year completed. Those who will graduate must remember those who would have, but who were killed last week instead. Those who move on have to think back on those who couldn’t, who weren’t given a choice to do so.

But in this somber time around the country, and especially around college campuses, our lesson to keep in mind should be that tragedy is not the only thing from which we can learn. All too often we feel suddenly sentimental when the unthinkable happens. We mark days in history – Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Columbine and, now and in years to come, Virginia Tech – with moments of silence, wreaths and ribbons honoring our fallen fellows, and rightfully so. But we must also remember the smaller things that can teach us just as much about the human experience.

In the last three years spent working at a university newspaper, the most recent year and a half as editor, I’ve seen a lot of these instances come and go. I’ve been there to cover a lot of them too.

Political pundits and iconoclastic idealists, radical speakers and shock seekers, Ku Klux Klansmen and religious activists, and now bomb-threatening jokesters and package-planting hoaxsters, have all brought their messages to campus. From time to time, they and others bring sensible ideas that perhaps would be good for the masses to hear; but those who tend to get the most attention, fleeting as it is, are of course the most controversial in their thinking. Be it with racism, sexism, rightism or leftism, they rile up students for a day or two, but even the most anger-inciting of these visitors doesn’t stir up the timeless energy that a gunman so many miles away apparently warrants.

The point that we are missing is that, metal detectors and invasive surveillance aside, there is little that can be done to prevent things like what happened to our Hokie neighbors last week.

But what can be prevented – silencing of our classmates and friends not with bullets and bombs but with hate-filled words and support for such ideas – only gets us moving till something better comes along. College students are known for being active, holding sit-ins and challenging norms, but when it comes down to it these days, we’ll only sit until we can stand for something else, soon just to be distracted to sit again.

If only we focused the same energy with which we’ll surely make a hundred banners and send 10 fold as many cards to be hung on a wall in a Virginia school, maybe we could change something that is actually changeable rather than harping on the inevitable.

So this is my challenge to you, the newspaper staff who will follow after me in reporting on our campus culture and the readers, students of higher thinking, who likewise are part of it:

Stand up and don’t stop standing until your black friends, your Hispanic friends, your Asian friends or your white friends receive the same treatment you do. Stand up and don’t stop standing until your neighbor whose religious beliefs aren’t quite the same as yours doesn’t have to worry about his first amendment rights being trampled. Stand up and don’t stop standing until the person sitting next to you in class has the same rights to marry, have children and be happy as you do. Stand up and don’t stop standing until the person who isn’t in class with you, for whatever reason, is.

Editor in Chief Chris Brown is a junior majoring in biology. E-mail him at cbrown@louisvillecardinal.com.