Self-loathing is a fickle mistress. On the one hand, the perpetrator can seem acutely aware of faults. On the other, it’s an excellent method of aligning oneself with the problems and not any foreseeable solutions.
Such is the case of Wednesday’s piece titled “CW caters to thoughtless student body,” a column that started out with what appeared to be a solid message before showing its true face as an 800 word insult hurled at “this, my generation…the generation that is so self-involved, so uninformed…that, in their mind, getting drunk on Sunday actually is the most important thing that happened this weekend.”
(There are many aspects of this letter to address, so please forgive me if my thoughts seem to jump from one place to another.)
Let’s get one thing out of the way from the start: The Crimson White is a local newspaper. Yale, Princeton, Harvard – these newspapers also cover local news. If you take a quick glance at the Harvard paper’s website you will very plainly see this. In fact, as I write this, the only piece at The Crimson (Harvard’s paper) that deals with anything outside the Harvard community is on the Opinions page, a place where anyone can literally write about anything.
Which brings me to my next point: if you are oh-so disconcerted over the downfall of civilization via Generation Text, why don’t you offer your services to The Crimson White as a columnist? It’s simple enough – I, a member of the generation that has made the white trash cast of Jersey Shore a household name, did it; so clearly, someone with the infinite wisdom and self-importance that can only be achieved through attending law school should have no trouble.
On a side note, whatever the youngest job-seeking generation is at the time is the absolute worst in history; whichever generation directly follows that one is the harbinger of the apocalypse.
Shifting focus, let’s discuss the idea that college students don’t care about what’s going on around the world. It’s completely accurate, but it’s not because we’re apathetic or self-absorbed. It’s because we can’t relate, and we can’t relate because we lack the perspective one can only gain through a life of experiences. My father can better understand (and thus be more interested in) rising fuel costs because he lived through the crisis in the 1970s. I, on the other hand, am not only less directly impacted by this (what with still largely being dependent on my parents), but I also have no real personal history that allows me to view it from anywhere but the outside.
Of course one way to gain perspective is through the study of history. I know studying the 1910 Mexican Revolution happens to be significantly more interesting and engaging when similar events are currently taking place in Tunisia (among other nations). That being said, one without the other becomes background noise because I simply lack any real point of reference.
Thomas Nagel once wrote (and I’m simplifying here) that to be conscious is to have a subjective character that can only truly be experienced by the organism. Thus, as Nagel wrote, we can know everything there is to know about the physiology of a bat, but we can never know what it is actually like to be a bat.
The relevance of this is that while I can keep up with the union battles in Wisconsin, I can never know what it’s like to be a union worker until I actually am one. Personally, I don’t think it’s fair of me to have any real opinion on the matter if I cannot fully understand the perspective of one side or the other (obviously this isn’t true of everyone).
Not to mention that even if I wanted to know everything there is to know about the situation, it’s impossible to find a news outlet that somebody somewhere won’t decry as being a liberal mouthpiece or a conservative puppet. Any real discussion becomes nothing more than “Oh, you got your information from Outlet XYZ so clearly you’re just a liberal/conservative nut job.” So excuse me and my generation for being a little cynical, a little disenfranchised when any attempt at actual dialogue or fact-finding becomes a shouting match between two extremes of insanity.
So yeah, maybe I do want to go to Publix on a Sunday, buy a six pack, and plop down on the couch to watch something that will make me laugh, because in the year 2011 comedy is the only thing that doesn’t induce teeth-grinding frustration.
But hey – Libya, am I right?
John Davis is a junior majoring in anti-social entrepreneurship. His column runs on Thursdays.
