This week marks two years since the start of Occupy Wall Street.

Since then, the movement has gained global momentum until it eventually became too unorganized and faded into distant memory. However, since 2011, the world has witnessed young people take to the streets to address the problems of tomorrow.

The Arab Spring of the Middle East. Police accountability in India. Corruption transparency in Brazil. In the past week, there were student marches at a university in Cairo, Egypt, and in Toronto to protest federal telecom rules.

Now, with chancellor-designate Kent Syverud, students of Syracuse University have an opportunity to push forward in a similar movement toward change.

Marching occurs in many traditional forms of protests.

To march, you need the energy and strength to shout loud enough so that an unwilling audience will hear your message. But most importantly, need an undeniable sense of citizenship that forces you to take up the cause.

There is something more inspiring about marching than other forms of protest, such as sit-ins, petitions, boycotts or rallies. It is an altogether different euphoria to experience thousands of strangers march toward a goal.

There is an ever-present fear of police, with whom you empathize for their impossible task yet despise for their attempts to control your inherited and inalienable right to express discontent.

The problem with marches, as with all protests, is that they aren’t a solution. To overcome a challenge, a movement must be organized, demanding, accountable and productive.

There is not a lack of students who could take on such a challenge at SU.

Yet we remain a campus without many large demonstrations. Last semester alone, there were several protests that garnered less than 50 students each: A silent sit-in at Schine Student Center, which called for an end to discrimination at SU, and an outdoor demonstration that asked for the fair reinstatement of several officers following a controversial reform to the Department of Public Safety.

Someone recently suggested to me that one of the reasons the Occupy movement died down was because the urgency of the cause didn’t justify sitting through the winter. Yet, it is hard to believe that in a country of hungry people, of the highest global percentage of both incarcerated citizens and drug addicts, where less than 5 percent of the world’s population consumes more than 30 percent of its energy, there is no cause worth continuously taking to the streets.

At SU, nothing has come close to matching the euphoria of a march other than a Final Four appearance and a worldwide hashtag #ThingsIdRatherDoThanGoToBlockParty.

We can’t help but wonder why students who invest in their futures are not increasingly indignant of rising tuition, especially in a country where student debt has surpassed credit and house debt combined.

If this cannot spark this country’s youth, what will?

With a new chancellor, the student body now has an opportunity to engage in a debate with the administration about where we would like our money allocated. As the primary stakeholders in this university — and who are both the main consumers and investors — students have the right to organize themselves to create such a movement. It’s why we see youth around the world march to the streets.

Now the student body must determine what issues are worth it.

Ignacio Nava Auza is a junior international relations major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at ninavaau@syr.edu.

Published on September 25, 2013 at 12:42 am