Lancaster Bible College (LBC) may be small, but the hearts of its faculty and students are big.
Next week, 44 students and four faculty will travel from the picturesque heart of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to hurricane-wrecked Houston, Texas in order to help with cleanup from Hurricane Irma. The group will work with Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational Christian International Relief organization.
During their five day trip, the students and faculty will work at four different sites removing wet material from homes such as insulation, drywall, and mud. The organizer of the trip, Professor Judd Buckwalter, told Lancaster Online that he pitched the idea of the trip to school officials after seeing the devastating effect that Hurricane Irma had on the communities of Texas.
Buckwalter was encouraged by the response of his students. “Within 24 hours we had over 70 applicants to fill 44 seats, which was pretty exciting to see,” he said. “It suggests there’s a real heart in this generation to meet the needs of people.”
Buckwalter explained why the students of LBC are so willing to help people they have never met.
“This generation of college students is certainly characterized by an unwillingness to sit back and take in information and simply respond by talking about it,” he told Red Alert. “They MUST engage and become involved.”
LBC students and faculty will seek to bring hope and unity to the people of Houston, representing not only their school but their core beliefs, to be “the hands of Jesus” to those in need.
On the other side of the country, students and faculty at UC Berkeley are also uniting, but under a much different cause, where their actions are shaping up to be far less peaceful. As Milo Yiannopoulos made plans to descend on the Berkeley’s campus for Free Speech Week, nearly 200 faculty and grad students signed a letter calling for a campus boycott to “physically and mentally” protect students, in light of violent threats to disrupt the visiting speakers and events.
UC Berkeley shelled out $600,000 in security fees when Ben Shapiro came to campus and Yiannopoulous’ Free Speech Week cost upwards to $800,000. Threats of violence from Antifa continually force Berkeley and its right-leaning speakers to pay thousands of dollars to attempt to maintain law and order on campus.
In response to violent protests earlier this year at Berkeley and in preparation for Shapiro’s recent talk and the Free Speech Week, the city overturned a 20-year-old ban on pepper spray, allowing police officers to use pepper spray to prevent violent protests.
Threats of violence have skyrocketed. Posters have appeared condemning “white supremacy” and “hate speech.” These actions (and previous protests and threats) foreshadow continual unrest for Berkeley, which was once the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement. These students are uniting to shut down speech.
This situation is so unfortunate because Antifa members at Berkeley truly believe they are fighting for a good cause. They believe that violence is an acceptable way to cope with differing opinions, and that disruption and fear-mongering is part of “standing up” for a belief.
These activists are terribly misguided. These tactics serve to bring greater division and unrest to the nation, and show a blatant disregard for the well-being of others.
There are peaceful ways to protest, there are constructive ways to disagree, and there are much more worthy causes to spend one’s time on. There is much to be gained from exhibiting a true effort to love our neighbors as ourselves. Lancaster students understand this well, but Berkeley students, not so much.
