When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived with one housemate, across the street from campus, surrounded by my fellow humans, in a house built before I was born, on Brookside in Stockton, California, and I took my college courses drearily, through rote memorization with my own mind.

So one day I was surprised when I looked up and saw a city.

Attending college, to me at least, means keeping one’s brow to their books, eyes pointed ever downward, working ever harder to attain a diploma and prove one’s worth.

But that’s not the only way of living, much to my surprise. In college, I’ve seen people waste more money than all of my belongings are worth, I’ve seen people who have even less than I go even farther than I, and I’ve seen that beyond the walls of the University of the Pacific there is an entire city, filled with people, some working harder, some hardly working, but all together a city. And I was entranced.

It’s hard to not hear the numbers and cringe. After all, Stockton is rather infamous. It's been in numerous articles, subject to a number of studies, and has even been referenced in Presidential speeches.

(For those of you who didn’t do a cursory Google search or won’t, here are some numbers: 49 homicides in the city, in both 2014 and 2015, ranking the 18th most murders per capita in 2014. Stockton also has the dubious title of Ground Zero of the Recession, rated the third least literate city in the nation, and has 35.7 percent of residents living below the poverty line. So yeah. It’s a little infamous.)

Hearing these numbers from friends and family, I decided that the best course of action would of course be to never leave the safety of three or four campus buildings. To hide my head, and wait for the glorious day when I graduate. But then I went on a blind date, and as much as I want to say I went on a blind date with the city, that would be a little too much artistic license.

We went to the Haggin Museum, an art museum with a lot of character. While classical art exhibits are fascinating, I was more concerned with whether or not the date was going well. I kept asking questions, trying to show off my wit and intelligence. I was so flustered that I almost missed the museum's historical collections.

Walking through, the first thing that had blown me away was the fact that Stockton even had so much history. Stockton was once prosperous (at least, comparatively) and advantageously placed near the Delta. It was a transportation hub as well as having some fertile farmland, and was an industrial powerhouse during the 1930s.

At the time, I was nonplussed about the interesting historical facts and more confused as to how to get the girl to like me, but then I realized something. Stockton was a city that was tired of trying. It had taken one rejection too many, had too much legislative pressure to change, adapt, conform, impress, and the industrious spirit that was there previously seemed absent. And like the city of Stockton, my desire to change, conform and impress vanished. There was, fortunately, no follow-up date.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that all my fellow college students who attend Pacific tend to trash talk the city of Stockton, make horrible jokes at the city's expense, and ignore it, because if it’s not willing to put in the effort, why should anyone else be?

Right?

Except Stockton hasn’t given up. The city of Stockton is no longer within the top 10 most murders in the nation, thanks to Police Chief Eric Jones and the numerous agencies designed to fight the problem, like the Office of Violence Prevention. While state-funded education seems to be lacking (to the surprise of everyone, of course) some schools manage, and others interact directly with the University of the Pacific’s HopeStreet, which helps provide basic school supplies to children in need. President Obama even singled out a school from Stockton as a reference to successful centers of education. Visit Stockton, the tourism board of the city, is making an active effort to ensure that tourism increases in a city with such incredible amenities.

Stockton is a city full of brilliant stories and harsh metallic aftertastes. It’s strong, but unless people see it for its full strength, Stockton may never emerge as the city it could be.

So yeah, this is, in part, a call to action. It is especially aimed at the home team: University of the Pacific students, what are we even doing? How can we call ourselves good, kind, just people, and sit around doing nothing?

But in part, this is a much bigger question. Even if every student were to volunteer, even if we could inspire courage and ambition in everyone, what next? Where does Stockton go, and how does it get there? We could give up when faced with this task, say that we don’t understand the complexities or even how to get around the challenges.

It’s a shame there isn’t a center of learning nearby with the resources and time to devote to improving the city, helping fix the problem at it’s roots.

Yeah, I’m shamelessly plugging in University of the Pacific, but I’m doing it for a reason. In the coming months, cities across the United States are going to be shambling back to some semblance of their old status quo, and when they get there they will quietly plop down, and hope that another storm doesn’t push them away.

Attending college doesn’t mean anything if we don’t use our education. If nothing else, we owe it to the city we live in to better understand its past. We owe it to the city and to ourselves to do the most of what we can.

So that way, when Stockton finally stands up, we can be a part of the driving force that got it there.

Or we’ll remember when we had that opportunity to make a difference and ignored it.

It’s each of our calls, really.