Wild Animals

So I have a close friend who attends an East Coast liberal-arts college
of very similar academic caliber and prestige to Amherst–I’ll refer to it
as Bleecker College. Because he lives down here in DC, I’ve had the
opportunity to meet a few of his friends from Bleecker. When the subject has
come up that I go to Amherst, the reaction is universally identical. Their
eyes bug out, and their eyebrows make a beeline for their hairline. Their
shoulders thrust backwards as if I’d reached out and pushed them, and their
voices hit near-falsetto tones: “Really?! You go to AMHERST? WOW!” From that
point on in the conversation, I am treated differently. The level of respect
I receive rises–everything I say is treated as if the fact that I go to
Amherst gives it an extra level of imprimatur. The first time it happened, I
was able to dismiss it as just the person who did it being a douchebag. But
then it kept happening. I can’t help but think that students at Bleecker are
huge prestige whores. Other comments they have made that have led me to this
conclusion include the following:

1. About a pre-frosh from the mid-west who eventually decided to attend
Calvin College, a christian school close to home: “I can’t believe he chose
Calvin over us. He would have loved Bleecker!” I responded, “I don’t know, I
can understand wanting to go to college closer to home.” To which this
Bleecker student responded, “Yeah, but why would anyone choose Calvin over
Bleecker?”

2. On choosing to apply to Bleecker early over Yale: “You know, sometimes I
wish I had a yale.edu email address, just because I think people would
respect it more. Don’t you?” I responded, “Well, I think an amherst.edu or a
bleecker.edu email address is still quite impressive. Besides, would you
want to go to school in New Haven?” He responded, “I think we can get back
at Yale by all going to grad school at Harvard.”

The fact that I’m so taken aback by this prestige-whoredom, I think, says a
lot about institutional values at Amherst. I think from Tony Marx on down,
there’s a very strong sense that as much as we’re all really intelligent at
Amherst, we also had a strong element of privilege or good fortune that has
separated us from other intelligent people who don’t have the opportunity to
go to Amherst and who don’t have the educational opportunities we do as a
result. Granted, there is a vocal minority who oppose this view on the
Jolt/Confessional/etc, but I think that the majority of Amherst students
accept that gaining admission to Amherst or a similar institution isn’t just
about one’s brainpower. The corollary to that is not to judge other people
based on where they go to school (or if they go to school at all.) Our
tendency to stereotype UMass/Hampshire students notwithstanding, I think the
majority of Amherst students buy into this. I’ve come to appreciate this
value a lot more in recent weeks.

Also, I don’t think that Amherst is the only school that avoids
prestige-whoredom. I’ve been meeting people this summer who go to places
like Princeton, Vassar, Davidson, Holy Cross, UVA, Brandeis, CSU-Chico,
Bethel College, Franklin College–in other words, a really diverse group of
schools–and none of them react the same way to finding out that I go to
Amherst. Even the ones that have heard of Amherst, and know that it’s a very
good school academically, still react in a much more subdued way. They don’t
change the way they act towards me because they know I go to Amherst. I
prefer it that way.

This is really, really cool. It’s so simple, yet so clever and well-made.

I don’t like reality TV. Survivor, Wife Swap, I Love New York–never did anything for me. There is one show, however, that holds a soft spot in my heart. It was aired at the beginning of the reality-TV craze on ABC, and it was called The Mole. The premise is fairly simple: Twelve people work together to complete various puzzles while traveling around. One of them, however, “The Mole”, is working to sabotage them. Every episode, each contestant must take a quiz in which they are asked questions about the identity of the mole, and whoever gets the lowest score loses.

Guess what? This shining beacon in the sludge heap of reality television…is BACK! I, for one, who hasn’t watched a TV show religiously since Arrested Development, will be watching. It starts on Monday at 8 PM East Coast time. Give it a shot. It’s fun.

1. The Raconteurs: “Carolina Drama”

2. Tokyo Police Club: “Tessellate”

3. Saul Williams: “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”

4. Les Savy Fav: “The Equestrian”

5. Los Campesinos: “You! Me! Dancing!”

6. Band of Horses: “The Funeral”

7. Janis Joplin: “Piece of My Heart”

8. Jeff Buckley “The Sky is a Landfill”

9. REM: “Sing For The Submarine”

10. Be Your Own Pet: “Bog”

A friend of mine recently posted the following in a Facebook note:

“Over the last year, I have come to realize that humility is one of the best traits that a person can possess. I’ve also realized that humility is something I sorely lack.

These last two semesters, I’ve found myself learning more and more humility. Some of these lessons have taught me grace and how very blessed I am. Things like gifts I’ve received, getting into college, the people I’ve met, and the people I share my every day with. These have been some of the positive ways I have begun to learn the importance of humility.

I have also gone through a lot of difficult experiences and learned a lot of hard lessons that have humbled me. Hurtful words, embarrassment, having unintentionally hurt those I care about: many of these experiences were painful for me, but I feel as though I’ve learned from them.

For those of you that know me, whether we are friends or not: I realize that I can be an insufferably arrogant, obnoxious, sometimes even hateful person. I have a way of saying things and acting in a way that makes me seem as though I think I’m better than others. I say things without thinking, I interrupt people, I boast of my accomplishments, and I find myself sometimes talking down to people.

It’s annoying. It’s irritating. I alienate people. This has become very apparent to me in the last year. I sincerely apologize to anyone whom I have hurt with my attitude. Anyone whom I have hurt or made to feel belittled. My pride and arrogance are some of my biggest flaws.

I have a long way to go, and lot more humility to learn. I am working hard to humble myself. I only hope you can forgive me for my mistakes and my arrogance through the years.”

As you may have guessed, this friend of mine is currently a senior in high school. The sentiment, coming from a person his/her age, is fairly common. What I find so intriguing is that he/she chose to post this on Facebook. I should mention here that I was not “tagged” on this note, but it showed up on my news feed. Putting something on Facebook, in this day and age, is the equivalent of setting up a soap box in Times Square and shouting whatever you’ve written to the gathered masses of tourists. (Because, of course, no native New Yorker in their right mind would ever venture near that hell-hole of neon and glitz that is Times Square). Yet still, people have no second thoughts about posting their deepest thoughts publicly. A generation ago, this would have been written in a diary and locked away, possibly never to be seen again. We seem to have become a soul-baring generation, unafraid to tell our deepest, darkest secrets to whoever might stumble across our blog. Many of us even extend this culture of full disclosure all the way to our sex lives (which, to be entirely honest, I don’t understand in the slightest).

What I’ve discussed so far is nothing that people far smarter than I haven’t talked about a million times before. What I want to get in to is (1) Why we’re so willing to do this and (2) What implications it might have on the world in the upcoming decades.

I think the answer to the first question is deceptively complicated. It seems easy to dismiss this by saying “Because it’s there”; “Of course kids are going to post about their deepest feelings online–previous generations would have done it too if they’d had the internet.” I think this is only part of any serious answer. Why, then, do they so often choose not to utilize, say, the “private” feature on LiveJournal? The fact that these proclamations of deep feeling are so public is a huge part of the question.

The world that we are coming of age in is dramatically more complex than the one our parents came of age in. Yes, they had to worry that they might get sent to Vietnam and shot at, but at least there was a lot that they knew. In the internet age, we don’t even know what is truth and what is fiction anymore. See an enthusiastic product recommendation on a forum? They must be paid to promote the product. Someone wants to chat with you on AIM? They might be a sexual predator. The Internet allows for the distribution of tremendous amounts of information, but so much of that information is false, or misleading. This makes our generation incredibly cynical. There’s very little we trust these days (yet, somehow, we trust Wikipedia). Perhaps exposing our deepest, darkest secrets allows us to feel more real in a world where no one knows what’s real. Perhaps it’s intended as a signal to others that we are real.

Moving on to the second question: What does this mean for the future? The future will only become more complex, as we develop many more technologies to communicate with other. The world will become smaller and smaller. I think our ability to express ourselves will bring us together. We will begin to see more common ground with people of other races, other religions, other classes. We will learn that while a working-class Puerto Rican immigrant and a wealthy WASP might have dramatically different life circumstances and expectations, we will learn that they have a lot of the same concerns–friendship, love, identity. While I won’t be rushing off to join the masses of people blabbing about their deepest feelings in a Facebook note, it does give me hope that our future will be stronger, more peaceful, and less antagonistic than the world we live in today.

I fully expect that at some point in the near future, the person who wrote that Facebook note will stumble upon my blog and read this entry. I won’t regret a single word of what I’ve written, and I hope he/she doesn’t regret writing what he did, either.

I plan to use this for (hopefully) interesting discussions of campus and national issues. I plan to respond to Dave Ullman’s post about frats at Amherst, but that will have to wait.