Matt Dundas is the host of What-About Radio, a weekly news commentary radio show that runs every Monday at 5 p.m. on RainyDawg.org. Archived shows are available at whataboutradio.org.

With each new school year, I am excited about certain prospects. New pencils, new professors, new friends — those are basic.

Primarily, I am heartened by the thought that maybe this will be the year that more students will start to notice what was pointed out to me many years ago and has been on the forefront of my mind ever since: our society is in dire need of help and, most importantly, that the youth of our fine land are in the best position to provide this urgently needed, life-saving assistance.

Our generation will face some of the greatest challenges of any since World War II. We will be on the front lines of the struggles produced by climate change, the perpetual War on Terror, a decaying health care system, unprecedented number of species extinctions and the erosion of American civil liberties which threaten the core values of our republic from the inside as well as the outside.

With these issues, and still other urgent problems, such as the genocide in Sudan, the consolidation of big business and its effects on labor, and the expansion of the global economy, come responsibilities. As Americans, we are the fortunate ones, and we have the opportunity to affect change in ways that most people can only dream.

Albert Einstein once said, “Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” The good fortune of living in a land where the middle class drive around in cars bigger than the houses of the rich people in some countries, brings with it responsibilities not often mentioned on the nightly news or even in this publication. But the truth is that with all the money, knowledge and resources at our fingertips, we Americans could solve a lot of the world’s problems if only we decided to try.

That’s where you come in. With your fresh mind, your higher-than-average education, your way-higher-than-average bank balance (no matter how small it looks to you) and your youthful optimism, you can change the world — if you decide to recognize that the world needs changing.

A long time ago, a friend of mine taught me that you can sense the health of a society by smelling its political integrity.

Well folks, something stinks. It’s in the air. It’s in our traffic jams, spewing up gray balloons of soot. It’s in our reality television shows, which block out the footage of the vicious and endless wars currently being waged by the American government. It’s in our culture of greed, which drives too many young and talented minds into the corporate world rather than the public one. It’s in the unwillingness of the older generations to adhere to their civic responsibility to solve these problems. And it has to change or we’re in for a surprise.

Empires don’t last forever. America, if indeed it does exist in the form we were taught about as children, needs to be protected from the ravages of modern politics. If we hope to salvage America for the next generation, we must fight for it.

The issues mentioned in this article are but a primer for the road ahead, and they will continue to arise until they are dealt with in meaningful ways.

This column, partnered with the RainyDawg Radio show, “What-About Radio,” will attempt to kick-start your mind on issues such as civil liberties (tonight’s show deals with the privacy threats of the UW’s obedience to the Recording Industry Association of America’s witch hunt for student music downloaders, and our Oct. 15 episode highlights the threats posed by the UW’s idea for new Husky Cards that track your travel habits), climate change and its dire implications for species extinction and local corporate giants and their affects on the political and social environment.

This is all done with the hope that our generation will be the one to bring true meaning to the responsibility of citizenship. There are those who argue that the “greatest generation” was the one that won World War II. It is my fervent prayer that the real greatest generation has, in fact, not yet graduated from college.

[Reach columnist Matt Dundas at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]