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(04/22/15 6:15pm)
My grandfather used to tell me about growing up in the Italian suburbs of New York City. The Church, family, shared hardships – all these made neighborhoods more than a place where you lived. In a time before the Internet and cell-phones, personal connections, loyalties and reputations ran peoples lives. The community was unavoidable, both the bad and the good. Your reputation carried weight and going unnoticed was difficult, if not impossible. Community was not an abstract concept that had to be built; it was the foundation of people’s lives.
(04/08/15 11:13pm)
Like many Catholics, I spent last Sunday nodding off in Mass or trying to get the toddler in the pew in front of me to laugh. Like still more Catholics, I promptly forgot the sermon and jostled with my fellow parishioners to exit the Church when the one hour time limit was reached. I went to Church with my family, simply because it was the thing to do. Tradition demanded it and, being a sucker for the old-fashioned way, I hastily obeyed. Now that I am back at Middlebury, I will likely continue my habit of rarely attending Mass. I did not stop going simply due to some strange atheistic peer pressure; it just stopped making sense to me. So I stopped, and happily let my identity be molded by our academic, merit-driven community.
Religion is a tricky thing, and all too often it is intensely personal in its definition and application. While I no longer attend Church and do not feel particularly bad about it, there are elements of that community which a place like Middlebury cannot make up for. Religion may not be a prerequisite for a contemplative life, but I am sure most address it in their doctrine.
Now before you dismiss me as a little out of a touch, let me explain. At almost any place of higher education we can rely on a few staples. First and foremost is academic rigor. Here we pride ourselves on how hard we work and the quality of said work. Seriously, how many times per Proctor visit do you hear the phrase, “I have so much work.” Similarly – and perhaps this is more Middlebury specific – we take great care to eat healthy and exercise, satisfying our physical well-being. Lastly, many of us strive to be satisfied in our pursuits and satisfy our emotional selves. Bear with me here as I go out on a limb, but there is something in the contemplative and spiritual that is left unresolved in college.
I can guess what you’re thinking: something about new age or religious nonsense. Just humor me for a minute. (We all know you’re just killing time reading the paper while you wait for your friends in Proctor). If we were to define a contemplative life as self-reflective and concerned for the well-being of others, how many of you would fill that requirement? I would utterly fail. Who has time for that?
We pride ourselves on the strength of our community, yet that very definition of community is unachievable without a common sense of selflessness. In an environment of high stress mid-terms, job interviews, GPA worries and near constant anxiety, is it any wonder we spend so little time wondering how to improve ourselves? Is it any wonder we have so little patience for the problems of others or so little focus on the positive experience of those around us? Religion by no means mandates or succeeds in producing utterly selfless, community-centric people. After all, each one of us knows our share of bigots. Yet, at least it is an avenue for the discussion. In our on-the-run, work-until-you-drop, please-don’t-drop-my-GPA world, we have little time or energy to work on being better people.
This is a wonderful ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone were nice, right? Personally, I have very little energy or patience for my neighbors; I find it weighs me down to take on other people’s worries. Extending that to a stranger would seem an almost impossible task, and certainly one with no guarantee of personal reward. Which is, after all, what we want right? However, none of us can possibly come up with an excuse for not putting any effort into being less selfish people. Even if that means something as small as waking up in the morning and trying to be a better partner, sibling, cousin or neighbor.
I had an interesting conversation with a mentor of mine who repeatedly asked me the question, what do you want? I managed to conjure up some professional sounding words concerning a future career. In an hours time, I ended up where we all end up. I want to be around friends and family who I take care of and who take care of me. It is not exactly a complicated goal, certainly not an original one. To achieve it we need to step outside ourselves for just a little bit and pay attention to the people around us. So I leave you with this final thought: decades from now when people talk about you, what would you have them say? My hope is that it wouldn’t be, “they were a pretty good student and made some good money.” Rather, with any luck, it’ll be something like, “they cared more for their friends than they did themselves.”
(03/18/15 11:51pm)
Does anyone know how to disable the news column on your Facebook newsfeed? You know the little column that gives you 30-word blurbs about various nonsense happening in the world today? You know what I am talking about? It usually keeps me up to date on important things that qualify as “news” like, what Kanye West is up to, what no-name reporter is apologizing for a remark that most people did not even know about, or, my personal favorite, what Sarah Palin’s daughter is doing (This thing does not pull up results based on your interests, right?). I am glad I have this little column of “trending” news to keep me up to date. How else would I be able to stay knowledgeable on all these important current events?
Okay, I exaggerate and I realize many of you do not pay much attention to the various bits of attention-seeking sound bites that breed in social media. The wider world clearly does pay attention though. While the current antics of musicians or politically irrelevant daughters aren’t particularly damaging bits of information, they don’t exactly provide the much-needed context to the busy world of current events. We could hardly say they even qualify as news. The real problem is that whatever happens to be “trending,” (I guess that is to say “popular?”) is not necessarily what is important. Also when did hashtags become acceptable titles for news articles? Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon.
Let’s be serious here: most reasonable people can agree that any endemic problem in our society is remarkably complex, be it racism, a Social Security system that will go broke in the foreseeable future, or the political complexities of the Middle East, pick nearly anything in the world and it cannot be summed up in a hashtag or a blurb. Yet, our news not only has become “Look what this outrageous thing this absurd person said,” but in many ways it has simply become irrelevant. The things that need reporting seem oddly absent. We are remarkably concerned with the political correctness of attention seeking people and have comparatively less patience for, oh I don’t know, the number of people who die in car accidents every year, which is somewhere north of 30,000.
So why, oh why, do we put up with this crap? Do we just not have the patience for the news anymore? Something could definitely be said for the shortening of our national attention span. We seem to have tragically begun confusing our entertainment for the news. That is not to say people in other political camps have somehow avoided this problem either. The rise of the Internet and its children — the tweet and the status — have infected our perception of “staying up to date.” Not too long ago the only mediums for being attuned to the comings and goings of the world were the newspaper and television. But who has the time to read the paper anymore? And who wants to watch a news program where you actually have to listen along? With the rampancy of social media we have deputized any incompetent’s Buzzfeed article so that is carries the weight of a journalist’s work. How many of you remember the #CancelColbert wildfire that effectively started with a young woman misunderstanding a joke and the resulting witch-hunt to end the Colbert Report? And that’s only one example, go take a look at your newsfeed, or YikYak or Twitter and see all the inane, nonsensical things that for some reason, we take seriously.
The “millennial” generation, which I guess we have been dubbed, has been quick to adopt and vigorously protect social media and Internet freedoms. It has become something that has defined our generation. Yet we have been incredibly hesitant to see any flaws in this new, lightning quick, information typhoon. “Information” on its own we intrinsically see as good, but that does not mean we have to value it all equally. Nor does it mean more is always better. Something like ISIS takes more than a few articles to understand, something like American politics demands vigorous, in-depth, debate to function. Whether it is a global phenomenon or our own institutions, we lose something valuable when arguments or “the news” can be summed up in a tweet. We should never silence voices, but we can discern which ones truly deserve our attention. Do I really care that Reddit thinks the ravings of a delusional state senator are important? We can change the debate by simply not giving credence to the nonsense. The most constructive thing we can do is talk about the issues we know to be real and let the attention-seeking, the nonsensical and the foolish be shouted unnoticed.
(02/26/15 1:54am)
I am not a fan of unsolicited advice, and with that in mind I am going to give some. This is the last generation of Febs I will be here to see before tragically graduating a little less than a year from now. While I will hopefully be ready to go by then, three years ago I could have used some frank advice because as most Febs know, the scariest part of being a Feb is not getting out and seeing the world, but finally getting on this campus. So keeping in mind the memories of intense insecurity, doubt and anxiety from three years ago, I know that my freshman self would have appreciated a little real talk. So listen up:
Like many febs I applied early decision, checked both the Feb and non-Feb boxes, got my acceptance, and waited for more than a year to get on campus. That was a long, long year. So long that I forgot much of what the campus looked like and why I had chosen to apply. I was absolutely sick of explaining people why I was going to be attending college a semester late. No, I was not a special student. Yes, I will graduate in four years. No, I’m not on any sort of wait list. After all this I had set my expectations high and envisioned my college experience to be some kind of blend between Animal House, Old School, and Good Will Hunting. While I would still jump at the opportunity to don a toga, Middlebury isn’t quite like the films would suggest. Middlebury is not going to exceed all your expectations. There’s going to be disappointment, hardship and lot of late nights. Don’t let that get the better of you. Make your experience your own; nobody is going to make it for you. Do things you love with people you love and don’t feel bad about it.
My second point of anxiety came with classes. It took me too long to realize what I wanted to study. I had vague intentions of “exploring my options,” and I took a lot of classes for reasons I don’t quite know. More than that, I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to declare a major as I saw my peers connecting with advisors and finding exciting areas of focus like, “Religion with an Environmental focus.” I also struggled with the pressure we have all felt to select a major that will “make us some money.” When it comes to a major, don’t worry about it. Majors tend to find the student, not the other way around. Pick a major where the classes do not feel like classes. Pick a major because it explains the world to you. Pick a major that won’t have you looking at the clock every fifteen minutes. Chances are you will be better at the things you enjoy and you can make some money doing it. Take your time, find your groove, there are too many incredible classes here to be taking classes you don’t enjoy.
Let’s talk about social life. How do you talk about something that so many Midd kids struggle to have a healthy relationship with? I remember looking forward to each weekend with a pent up enthusiasm that seemed to wane week-by-week as I realized that, despite what the movies had told me, college students actually do other things with their free time than drink. Not that there’s anything wrong with drinking. Give it enough time though and you will realize that weekends are commonly used as a way to “blow off steam.” While I’m all for having a good time, and you should have a good time, don’t change. Be the person at 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning in the Grille that you are Tuesday in class. No, don’t go drunk to class, but don’t use the weekends as an excuse to be a different person.
I could go on and on, but advice tends to lose it’s potency the more it’s given. More than anything, baby febs, it’s up to you. Things are not going to be fantastic because your tour guide or your orientation leader said so. Things are going to be fantastic because you make it so. So keep meeting new people even when you feel like you have your circle of friends, try new things even when you think you know what you love, and be confident with who you are. Everything else is really up to you; take it from an old guy.
(02/11/15 11:31pm)
NOTE: I would like to take a paragraph this week to apologize for a line in my last Op-Ed. While many of you were focused on the strange new rivalry between NARP’s and athletes, a poorly thought-out, badly phrased hypothetical appeared at the end of my piece. Had it been merely an opinion that was unpopular, which it certainly was, I would let the words speak for themselves. However, this was not the case. By simple bad writing, I expressed a sentiment I myself do not believe. I have written this column for a large part of my Middlebury career and I have to take responsibility for what appears in it. It was not my intent to belittle the cause of feminism, demean women or do any of the host of other things the line in question implied. I hope many of the readers who are familiar with this column would understand this was a blunder of carelessness, not of malice. Thank you to all the people who cared enough to contact me with some really powerful and interesting responses. I made a mistake, I am accountable for it, and I apologize if I have hurt or betrayed the trust of any friends and readers.
While many of us lamented (or praised) the string of blizzards that pounded New England over break or cheered (or cried) during the events of the Super Bowl, our peer over in the granite state made a dramatic announcement. No, they were not replacing their logo with clip art, or building more houses in the woods behind their Campus. No, no, Dartmouth was banning liquor on its campus. Yes, as of the start of their Spring term, all beverages containing over 15 percent alcohol will be banned.
Alums are debating the effects of this policy heatedly, certainly, but also, to my surprise, adults I encountered over break. I, of course, answered that we were not Dartmouth. Please, we prefer not to be associated with those across the river. This policy appears to be unique to Dartmouth as Dartmouth has its own set of issues surrounding Greek life that simply do not exist at Middlebury. Yet, issues regarding alcohol are not Dartmouth’s alone. While it may not be as heavily publicized, Middlebury is not immune to the issues surrounding alcohol consumption; hazing and sexual assault come immediately to mind. So while the consequences of Dartmouth’s policy will be endlessly debated, perhaps we have an opportunity to reflect on our own social experience and alcohol culture.
It is no secret that a large number of Middlebury students have grown discontented with social life on campus and to be honest, who can blame them? Underage students take shots so they are not caught with a beer in hand, Atwater suites pick up the slack for social houses often bogged down in administrative procedure, the closed door party has become preferable to large events. These issues are not without substance and while it may seem petty to advocate for a better “social life” of all things, we do have a vested interest in all aspects of our experience. The question at hand is whether our current predicament is a function of the College or us?
The cop-out answer is a little bit of both. To be fair, I have had a Public Safety officer mark me down for not having bags of chips accessible enough to a party. But I have also had a string of drunk individuals attempt to fight me for not allowing them into said party. So yes, neither side looks particularly good. However, there needs to be some give and take. In our heart of hearts I think we could all admit that liquor tends to do more harm than good. However, if a policy like Dartmouth’s is to be effective there needs to be reciprocity of some kind. In the perfect world this would be a leniency towards alcoholic beverages under 15 percent.
Despite its good intentions the Dartmouth policy is doomed to fail for largely the same reasons. Yes, ban liquor, liquor is bad, liquor leads to bad things. Can something be given in return though? A little discretion? Some better laws? If not, threats of punishment ring hollow. A liquor ban looks good on paper but it would only serve as a Band-Aid for issues that occur when students, a college, and alcohol intersect. Enacting policies that provoke fear of punishment will only push dangerous behavior behind closed doors. We could take a lesson from this in examining our own policies. Is it worth looking good on paper if it means pulling the blinds and locking the door to take a shot?
(01/22/15 1:18am)
My family members have never been “gun people.” Nobody has ever owned one; it is doubtful any of us could tell you how to load one and it is highly unlikely any of us will be buying one in the future. I was always told as a boy that guns were like needles on the street or strangers, that you should never touch one and the only people who carry them are cops, bad guys and the military. You can imagine my surprise when my mother announced one Saturday this summer that she had purchased the family a Groupon for a beginner-shooting lesson at the local gun range.
This had to be the start of some kind of joke. “So the DeFalco family gets a Groupon to the gun range…” I’m not sure what the punch line would be but I was already laughing at the lead-in. A gun range? A Groupon? From my mild-mannered mother? We are city people, my parents grew up in New York and we have spent our lives in other large metropolitan cities like Toronto and Boston. Most city people can tell you that a gun in the city carries a different connotation than a gun in the country. Yet, there we were. The DeFalco family had piled into the car to go cash in our Groupon and go shooting.
I was terrible. The instructor assured me that it’s hard the first time, but after sending three bullets ricocheting off the ceiling he politely took the AK-47 out of my hand and suggested I try the pistol. I spent most of the afternoon watching my family send bullets flying through paper targets while I tried to feel proud about my abysmal accuracy. As funny as the whole production was, I was not particularly interested in the antics of my family. Instead the “regulars” fascinated me. Ordinary looking men and women who calmly entered the range, firearms in sleek looking cases, loaded and prepped their weapons professionally and didn’t think twice about sending entire clips into a target. I still tried to feel proud about my four-for-ten accuracy.
Now, I live in Massachusetts, a state with perhaps the strictest gun regulations. It is not a common thing to run into people who own guns or talk about guns and, more often than not, the whole idea is frowned upon. Here was an entirely new group, who appeared to have a real passion for what they were doing and handled it with a degree of professionalism I had never associated with gun ownership. To be fair, I was a little turned off by how easy it would be for any of these people to take me down at fifty yards, but damn it looked cool.
I later learned that we had all gone on this odd excursion as more than just a charming family activity. I think the Aurora and Newtown tragedies had struck a chord in my parents and they realized that maybe they should know at least something about these metal sticks that kept making the news. It was a curiosity bred out of anxiety. The whole exercise was a way to understand something that was completely foreign, even if nobody in the family was in a rush to do it again. And it did change my perspective. I was unnerved by how easy it was, how simple it was to simply point and shoot, but impressed by the thrill of it. I was no crack shot but to my surprise it was a lot of fun.
So what is the long-winded, long-coming moral of the story? Try new things, even if they directly contradict your beliefs? Well, sure. We do that all the time though, right? (I’m looking at all you people who have yet to fill your distribution requirements.) I went to the gun range and I am still not overly fond of guns. My political views stayed largely the same, but at least now I had the experience of being able to understand what I didn’t like about them. Before the experience, I was only using news clippings and statistics to support my beliefs. It wasn’t until I actually went shooting that I could understand what it was that I didn’t like about it. To be fair, I also learned that while I’m a terrible shot, I also felt like a badass.
So here are my words of wisdom: try even the things you hate. If you’re a communist, take an Econ class, just to make sure you still believe what you belief. If you are a feminist, get a male in your life to try to talk about the experience of being a man. Listening and experiencing new things doesn’t mean you advocate them, but at least you can understand.
(11/12/14 7:15pm)
I am a little late on the uptake, but it appears our campus has taken a renewed interest in our social, or lack thereof, lives. Or perhaps long-simmering tensions have boiled over and all our angst and frustration is being made known. Or maybe we just had an opportunity to complain. No matter what perspective you have, President Liebowitz’s discussion on social life has revealed a lot on the administration and, more importantly, us as a campus.
Yes, I admit it. We do not have the most “college” of social lives. This is not a large school, this is not a school that still has Greek affiliations (with maybe the exception of KDR), so what are we really to expect? It’s Middlebury for God’s sake. We enjoy beer from independent breweries, long sunsets, and complaining about our workload. Getting belligerent in a toga on a Tuesday was never part of the equation. Though that does sound like fun.
We have a tremendous amount of trouble admitting who and what we are. There is an identity crisis somewhere in between loving a drinking culture and going out a couple times a semester. Do we want a more robust social life on campus? The answer seems to be generally yes. How do we get it? That’s the real question.
Well, who is responsible for taking all our fun?! Clearly, we are just a ton of fun on our own if only the administration and the long arm of the law, Public Safety, would just leave us alone! We’ve all heard that argument, and we’re all bored of it. I could tell you our Public Safety officers are doing their job, I could say to the kid chanting “F*%* Pub Safe!” to get over yourself. Most importantly, I could tell anyone that anywhere in the world there is no police officer that is nicer than one of our Public Safety officers.
In many ways we have come to this frustrating logical end by way of default. We need someone to blame for our stifled social culture, and Public Safety is the easy target of authority. I understand that. I have had Public Safety knock on my door at 8:45 p.m. on a Friday in an upperclassman dorm. I have had Public Safety lecture me about the placement of chips at a party. However, I would gladly suffer all these inconveniences in return for just any one of the times I have needed Public Safety officers and they have responded. Officers Paul, Bryan and Amy I immediately think of as people who have responded with professionalism and genuine concern to situations that I could no longer control. My only true regret is that I’ve only gotten to know these people from those situations. Wouldn’t it be better if student organizations took them out to dinner? Developed professional, working relationships rather than antagonistic ones? If we can’t control what the administration does, then that is on us as students. If we want a better social experience, changing the way we interact with Pub Safe on a regular basis could go a long way.
What about us though? Are all our misbegotten social woes really the fault of an administration or policy? Or is it something to do with us? Before you answer, think about the last time you threw some kind of event yourself, be it registered or un-registered. When was the last time you were on the contributing rather than receiving end of the Middlebury social experience? To the small number of you out there who have hosted large events you know that they are rather expensive, rather stressful at times, and can often be received by a student body that is plainly ambivalent. Let alone the risks of dorm damage, angry drunks and sexual assault. If everyone contributes, these responsibilities tend to even out. However, when it consistently falls upon a few select student organizations, it becomes burdensome, and frankly unappealing, to keep throwing those types of events.
Our social lives are not simply going to be handed to us — nothing in life ever is. The larger “Middlebury” experience is not going to simply be given to you. It has to be made, and that takes more than a little effort. The biggest misconception we have as a student body is that words alone will create change, be that selfish change or larger social change. Before we start demanding policy changes, let’s start living the changes we want seen. I guarantee we will have better luck. If you want a certain social experience, go out there and get it. Get your host training or your TIPS training or crowd manager training. Get to know Public Safety as genuine people. Let’s work on it ourselves; maybe everyone will have a little more fun.
(10/29/14 6:01pm)
I hope I will not appear as too much of a nerd by assuming you know about the world famous Italian plumber Mario. Mario spends his time jumping on turtles and saving Princess Peach in the aptly named “Super Mario” video games. By today’s standards Super Mario is a quaint game as it contains no guns, no real violence or realistic blood splatters. Cartoon characters make funny noises when you jump on their heads and the whole premise is outlandish and whimsical. Mario saves the princess and that’s all there is too it.
Why is this children’s (or college student’s) game of any consequence? Having two older brothers and a grandmother that liked to dote on us, video games were a fixture in my childhood. For that matter, some of the easiest stories to understand were things like Dr. Seuss and Mario saving a princess. What I did not know was even at that time I was beginning to form my conceptions on how men interact with women.
One of the real tragedies of male adolescence is that these unsaid messages begin to manifest. I’m not going to blame it all on Mario, movies and books did a lot of it too, but certainly I began to think that nice guys always got the girl. That if you persisted long enough in being nice she would eventually give in. In so much of our dialogue concerning sexism and sexual assault we assume a dramatic aggression on the part of male figures. We give little thought to obsessive, perhaps under-developed, not so popular boys who too are putting together a system for how they will later interact with women.
This of course is not something new. After all, how many little girls want to dress up as princesses? How many men grow up expecting a devoted sexual partner? This particular narrative is at once dangerous and disturbing. Yes, society has a clear interest in subduing aggression in the male population, but what do we replace it with? The not so subtle replacement is merely reward for good behavior. The villains will never win and the “good guy,” the one who was there for her when she cried, who offered to beat up the guy who made her cry, the one who sat on the phone for her for hours, will naturally end up with her. If we follow this logic through we end up in distressingly familiar territory, men believing they deserve sex as a reward for their good behavior.
If we could solve this problem it would go a long way towards creating healthier, more stable relationships. No matter how hard we scream, or perhaps how many op-eds we write, simply launching anger will not effectively change the way male self-esteem is formed. It is a far more difficult thing to raise our sons to be courteous, temperate and patient for their own sake, with no reward in mind. This is something churches and governments struggle with, let alone parents. The stories we have told children for hundreds of years enforce men as agents, deserving reward. So what if we just started telling different stories? Would my toddler self enjoy a game about Princess Peach? Maybe we could have fantasy novels with sincere heroines and not sexual caricatures?
It Happens Here is on Nov. 10 and if things repeat themselves, we’ll hear a lot of powerful, often emotionally difficult stories of sexual assault. For those of you that go, ask yourself this: would these situations have been avoided if men had a better image of how they see themselves? I am convinced that if we removed sexuality from what it colloquially means to “be a man,” we would take an enormous step in solving the problem of sexual assault. Keep in mind too that direct sexual assault and violence is one thing, the less obvious issue is the quiet young man believing he will one day be rewarded for his good behavior.
To redeem the video game industry a little, I have to admit that while it is still a male dominated industry, great strides have been made. The ability to play as male, female, gay or straight has become a recurring trend in many games. So it’s not all Mario and the princess. We can tell better stories as students and as a culture. We can tell stories about heroines with normal sized breasts who fight crime, we can tell stories about men who don’t need a woman’s affection to still consider himself a man. Maybe, the Princess got sick of waiting in her tower and maybe the handsome Prince simply helped her down and proceeded to go about his business without thinking much of it.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/08/14 6:14pm)
I had the remarkable experience of growing up as an ex-patriot. Yes, I grew up in the strange and foreign land of Canada, our friendly neighbor to the North. While my citizenship remained firmly American, an interesting thing happens when you live abroad. You suddenly become the spokesperson for your entire country. A strange transformation takes place and after a few years I found myself highly critical, yet highly patriotic. I knew all the flaws of my homeland — I had people ask me about them almost every day, and I would fight with tooth and nail to defend it. You can imagine my surprise when I came to Middlebury.
Yes, Middlebury, we are not the most patriotic of places. What was I to expect? An elite, liberal arts college in New England? Surely it must be filled with all manner of socialist degenerates! I digress. No, it wasn’t crude stereotypes about political affiliation (socialists make America great just like anyone else). It was a deep discontent with our republic. Something that went beyond the mere cynicism often associated with students.
I couldn’t and can’t understand it. I’m not exactly a red-blooded, Bible thumping American. I am often critical of my home: its foreign policies, its social policies, the people in it, but when push came to shove the United States was and is my home. My family has no real military tradition and has only been in this country since around the Second World War. There were stories about America told by my grandparents, though. Not necessarily how great it was, but how much worse the alternative was. Sure, grappa was drunk at family occasions and the toast “Next year in the homeland” was an ingrained tradition. These were empty words however. When asked directly whether my great-grandmother would want to ever go visit Sicily, her reply was simply, “Why the hell would I ever want to go back there?”
America, for her generation, was a dream, not because it promised anything, but because here they had the right to simply be left alone. Free from the horrors of endemic unemployment and Cosa Nostra, my grandparents and their parents had few positive thoughts about their homeland. Their children got American names and they were happier for it. They were happy to be free of a situation that was so hopeless they decided to get on a boat and sail for some unknown destination simply because it could not get any worse.
Of course things are not so black and white. The Mafia put my grandfather out of work at least once in New York. Their culture and language were effectively snuffed out, and for a long time, along with Jews and Blacks, Catholics were not welcome at institutions like Middlebury. But things were better. Imperfect, yes, but better.
So why have I walked you through this fairly typical immigrant odyssey? Because we lack something that generation had. It is the classic problem of the next generation: we don’t know how good we have it. We take things like Democracy, our Constitution, the wonders of the Bill of Rights, and accept them as merely for granted. Not many of us have had the experience of living in a place that did not have these things. So we are comfortable being opinionated, cynical, and unpatriotic.
True patriotism isn’t agreeing with everything your country does or says or liking the people in charge. I’m sure we can all think of true patriots who shook the status quo to its very core because they believed in American principles.
The elephant in the room (no party references intended) may just be our arrogance, Middlebury. Isn’t it convenient to become saturated in like opinion to the point where any idea outside our cozy bubble seems alien and wrong? Here we sit in our little ivory tower of liberal learning, in one of the most liberal of states, happy to enjoy the freedoms given to us at no cost, yet unwilling to participate in even the simplest of patriotic activities, voting for instance.
Have we ever paused to consider how incredible it is that we can do the things we do, simply without being bothered? We are allowed to protest tailgating bans, protest the protest of tailgating bans and openly critique our professors, elected officials and police officers (if you’re not stupid about it). What’s more, in perhaps the most deeply patriotic gesture, some of us even to spend our days critiquing, debating and questioning our government and then get a degree. Yes, our country is not perfect, yes, it could use some work. But it’s a lot better than most of the alternatives. So I make my case for America. Let’s hope our generation is willing to plug the holes in what might be a sinking ship rather than jump overboard.
Artwork by GLORIA BRECK
(09/25/14 3:04am)
What seems like a long time ago, I made a choice I proceeded to doubt. It was not until a few years had gone by that I understood why coming to Middlebury was one of the most important and best decisions I have made. However, I am sure by this point that sounds cliché. Lately it seems our institution has come under fire. We dropped in the US News & World Report College Rankings to seventh place, a new brand of activism seems intent on tearing down much of what Middlebury has built for itself, and more and more it seems our attitude is generally ambivalent towards the College. So who dare stands to champion our fair institution?
School spirit is not something that simply pops into existence. In fact, more often than not it is built over centuries. Well, we’ve had centuries. Where is our spirit? Sadly, it is non-existent in a lot of ways. Our traditions seem stale and two-dimensional. Whose fault is this, truly? Well, let’s take a look at the administration. If we took a broad sample of all the schools in the United States and compared administrations, I would say ours would end up in the top five percent. Yeah, they annoy us sometimes and we may not agree with everything they do, but they are pretty good. They show genuine interest in what we do, they take us seriously, they keep the lights on. To be honest, we should be thankful they even care at all. I am sure I do not need to point to examples of other schools’ administrations that simply do not care.
Our faculty is pretty great, too. We have the privilege of being students to really smart people. And when I say really smart, it is not a passing phrase. I mean, they are way smarter than you. Yes, freshman correcting the professor, we are talking about you. I do not know where we get these professors, but I would sure like to know. What kind of a professor asks about why I haven’t talked in class? Or invites me into their home for dinner? What kind of people even do that?!
So the administration is fine and the faculty is pretty great. Where does that leave us? Well, if you want to know where true responsibility lies we need only to look into the mirror. That’s right, I’m talking about you. Yeah, you, with the cynicism and the hands in your pockets, sipping a beer you got out of a social house basement fridge, wondering if the party next door is any better and if not you should probably just turn in. I’m talking about anyone who would rather rave about in college existentialism than make great memories. I’m talking about every person who complains about a lack of social scene and refuses to make any.
I was not surprised when Middlebury dropped down to seventh place. I am impressed we stayed at fourth for as long as we did. We’ve gotten, well, lame. We have become more concerned with what we can tear down instead of what we can build. The general consensus is to disavow ourselves of a struggling project rather than fix what is broken and make it something worth working on. Ask yourself, why do you love your school? If the answer is your friends, well, you would have those anywhere. Hopefully. What about this place, what is unique to Middlebury that gets you excited? Got nothing? Go find something.
We have often been referred to as the worst generation ever. I hate this term. Yet, looking around the student body, what do we stand for? Do we stand for ranting on the Internet instead of making substantial change? Do we stand for cynicism and vanity? For fear of getting our hands dirty or embarrassing ourselves? Jack Nicholson’s quote at the start of the The Departed is, “Nobody gives it to you, you have to take it.” He was, of course, referring to organized crime. The message is an important one, nonetheless! If we want to make a place that we reminisce about for the rest of our lives it is going to be some work. The majority of that work is going to come from the student body, because like it or not, we can be the true source of change around here if we find things worth changing.
To leave you with one last anecdote, my father told me when I entered into my first relationship that it was going to be hard work. Like everything else he said, you are always working on your relationship, always trying to make it better. This goes well beyond the realm of romance. Our experience is not going to be handed to us. College is not a rollercoaster we enjoy for four years and then politely exit. Our experience is ours, to make incredible, or merely mediocre.
(09/10/14 8:27pm)
My summer internship plans did not go well. I spent my Spring semester, as many Middlebury students do, hurriedly scribbling cover letters and attaching resumes to anyone willing to take on a lowly college student for little or no pay. The end result after email chains that lasted for months, interviews cancelled the day of and countless inquiries as to what my plans were, was silence. No replies. No condolence emails. Just dead silence as the academic year came to a close.
It is an odd feeling being ignored by positions that you are willing to work for at little to no pay. For the next month I convinced myself I was doing something productive with my time, that I was enjoying the break, that I needed some space. It was not until July, with my savings dwindling, that a swift kick in the ass from my father got me out of my self-pitying stupor. With all the dignity of a liberal arts student I wrote yet another email to the contractor who had recently renovated my parent’s home. The email went something like this.
“Dear Mr. ______, After a futile search for an internship this summer I have found myself looking for a job and was wondering if you would please hire me. Please, please give me a job, I need money so badly, please, please, I will work for little money. Please.”
Ahem. Okay, I exaggerate, but that was the general tone of the email. To my surprise, within the hour I had a response. “Hey Andrew, I really like a go getter. Let’s get you on a build site next week and see if we can work something out.”
It was my chance! The storm clouds had parted! Sure I didn’t know what I would be doing, but at least it was something. I would get to work outside, make a little money, maybe convince my father I was not a total lay about. What could go wrong?
In the next eight weeks I would be electrocuted, hit by a falling French door, breathe black mold, take a nail through the boot, get tendonitis in both hands, have a nail head rip a new scar in my arm and be smacked, whacked, cracked over the head and otherwise beaten up by one of the best jobs I have ever worked.
Construction work is hard, really hard. You wake up in the morning hurting in places you didn’t even know could hurt. Yes, the second row of knuckles on your right hand can be surprisingly painful. There was some pride in it though. A sense that you were earning your pay, that the numbers crawling upwards in my savings account were products of my literal sweat and blood. That alone was more than I could say for most of the internships I might have ended up at.
That was not to say it was always a great experience. Working in an attic on a 90-degree day pulling out insulation I could never spin as a good time. Not helping my case was the obvious observations that I was a college kid and I had no idea what I was doing on a job site. The first few weeks, more often than not, I was given a broom and told to sweep. Keep the job site clean. Sweep, sweep, sweep. I even got a lesson in how to sweep because apparently I was not much good at that.
In what I like to think of as parallel to the Karate Kid waxing cars for Mr. Miyagi, something started happening. My sweeping did not turn me into a master carpenter as perhaps waxing did for Daniel-san, but it did start to get me taken seriously. The college kid is pretty good at sweeping; maybe he can handle something else. Maybe he can cut two by fours. Okay he can do that; maybe he can rip out a bathroom. My sweeping was the avenue into jobs that actually contributed to the project, it was the way of proving I wasn’t just an uppity college kid afraid to get his hands dirty.
It is the rare experience that puts us completely out of our comfort zone. Even more so when all your training so far is completely useless to the job you have in front of you. My Political Science training did little to help me get a cast iron bathtub up a flight of stairs. Those experiences are often our most valuable. I find myself often deluded into a false sense of comfort here at Middlebury. That I can handle what comes my way based on the training I have received here. If you ever feel like you have everything figured out I would encourage you to pick up a broom and start sweeping.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
(05/07/14 3:55pm)
I am sure we are familiar with the resounding voice of Roger Daltrey screaming out the words “Who are you?” in the smash hit by The Who that bears the same name as the lyric. While I have listened to Daltrey sing this over Townshend’s guitar riffs for years, only recently have I actually taken the time to answer his question. Now just as Daltrey asked us I am asking you Middlebury, who are you?
I am sure when you toured the campus or went to an information session or got those incredibly annoying pamphlets in the mail, Middlebury claimed to know exactly what it was. Why it’s so simple! We are a small liberal arts college in northern Vermont. We are really good at languages and environmental science. Robert Frost hung out here for a little bit and we take credit for Alexander Twilight and the food is free. Oh, and Bihall is pretty nice.
This is my bias: I love Middlebury. It was not always the case, but I can say it with full certainty now. However, I cannot help feeling a little deceived by the message sold to me three years ago. I find myself often questioned on the merits of liberal arts and unable to provide an adequate response. In an age where technical and specific knowledge seems to be more employable, what use is a liberal arts education? Well I am not sure. I guess we take classes in some different areas to get a few requirements. That is enough to claim liberal arts status right?
Our identity as a liberal arts institution has changed. The liberal arts are not what they were. Leo Strauss defined liberal education as, “…the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” I want to believe Leo Strauss and more and more I believe his perspective is one we should aspire to, yet often fail in our conversations on campus. Our identity as a place of liberal education needs an update for a changing world or at the very least a reaffirmation of some kind.
Yes, we have lost our way somewhat. We take the bare minimum outside our respective majors/minors and it seems few of us identify as students of the liberal arts rather than students of our given discipline. A liberal education has to be something more, something still relevant in a modern age. We do not have the technical facilities or faculties of many our peer institutions, so what do we offer in its place? What tangible skills do we gain from the liberal arts that make us identifiable as products of a liberal education?
We will never be experts in one very specific thing. That has never been the focus of a liberal education. However, we can perfect a broader more applicable skill that unites all disciplines. That skill is of course communication. If there is anything we should pride ourselves on, it should be our expertise in not only written argument, but verbal debate as well. The quintessential student of the liberal arts should not be recognizable by the degree on their wall, but by their skill as negotiators, mediators, diplomats and the very best debaters. So, when you are sitting at an awkward dinner party and someone whose had too many drinks questions the value of a liberal education, we can actively convince them that we do possess a certain tangible set of skills.
Persuasion and well reasoned argument has not been our forte lately, Middlebury. It seems of late not only has our academic ideology revolved around competition but also our debates outside the classroom. Our conversations have not been filled with well-reasoned debate. Instead we have opted to bash our opponents over the head with blunt ideology or simply ignore them. We have taken the easy road in the hopes of preserving a sense of elitism, a sense of infallibility that should be revolting to any student of the liberal arts. We should be better than that. We should take pride not in how stubbornly we hold to our given views but in the confidence that we have listened to argument and arrived at what we believe to be the best possible perspective.
Liberal education has never been for everyone. It takes a certain type of personality, a certain openness of character perhaps. We signed up for a liberal education whether we like it or not. We should count ourselves lucky, we get to define the liberal arts for the future. It will be us who decides how liberal education remains relevant in a rapidly changing world. So when The Who asks us, “Who are you?” we will have a good answer.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(04/23/14 2:55pm)
“Sort of going off that point, well not really, but in relation to that, based on what Kant would say, not me, but if we were to take the Socratic method and apply it to Einstein’s relativity, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath may reveal to be a work of art history but only if you interpret it that way.”
Okay, that is a little extreme but I am sure we have all heard this kind of thing before. Clipped, guarded comments meant to protect the author from any possible critique while simultaneously taking a long time to say nothing. Now, we are competitive academic people. Many of us have spent our whole lives competing for grades and GPAs, high honors and whatever other measures of intellect schools have come up with. At some point we realized that original, well-thought statements are too risky to take credit for, that even before putting an idea on the table we should make it as intentionally vague and defensive as possible, so as not to offend anyone.
Class registration recently came to a close and I wonder how many of us chose classes that we know we will be comfortable in. Isn’t that the point of college? To be the best in the class and get the highest grade? Well yes, but there is more to it than that. A grade can only take us so far and while the world eagerly awaits 4.0s and high honors and brilliant theses, all of us have faced moments in our academic career when the comfortable and the easy is not as intellectually stimulating as the B+ that took long nights of reading and preparation to achieve.
I am struck by how many of us walk into classes already measuring knowledge. We create hierarchies of the smart versus the struggling. Yet imagine the experience of walking into a class of your peers and admitting to yourself that you are the least knowledgeable of them all. Most of us (including me) would have difficulty coming to this conclusion, but can you imagine something more genuinely liberating? More exciting? After all, I would like to think we came to college not to reaffirm our own intellect, but to surround ourselves with people smarter than ourselves. That includes not only professors but our peers too.
When choosing classes and navigating our academic track here we face a similar dilemma. Do I succeed at the mundane or struggle with the arduous? Will my time here be spent coping with difficult material that is often both challenging and time consuming? I want to vouch for the second option, though we all know that jobs are not gained through mediocre grades. The world expects success and is typically not interested in the finer points. I can only counter that by saying if we are here for a GPA and a future position then we are only wasting time and someone else’s money.
We are told again and again to take risks and chances, and that is easy to do when you are not risking things we deem most important. It is a much more difficult choice to risk a GPA hit in taking a class you know to be difficult. That risk is worth taking, it must be. Our liberal arts education becomes rapidly different if we can stop thinking of ourselves as the smartest person in the room and actually admit that we have something to learn in truly rigorous study. It’s no longer a matter of collecting credits and requirements, achieving GPAs and writing theses. It’s about what it should be from the beginning: improving ourselves. If there is one piece of advice I could tell my freshman self it would be the obvious: don’t be above anything, learn from everything and approach academia with the sincere intention to learn.
Whenever we sign up for a new class or take a new turn in our careers here, there is one vital question worth reflecting on. Do I want to be a prince among peasants or a prince among kings? It is not an easy question to answer and it has bothered me for some time. It stretches far beyond Middlebury. While being the best of the mediocre may do wonders for our ego, that perspective will never let us accomplish wonders. Yes, people may critique your comments and your perspectives, but at least we can have the dignity to say that idea was ours even though it was wrong. We will be wrong, a lot. If we are to make a mistake, however, I would rather it be my mistake and in a period of my life when I am supposed to be preparing for the world. I would rather encounter many challenges and many mistakes than a string of constant success.
Artwork by TAMR WILLIAMS
(04/09/14 4:43pm)
I am not sure how many of you caught the news over the break. Amidst missing airlines and aggressive Russian foreign policy you may have noticed a headline about a particularly bad fire in Boston. While usually a fire is not newsworthy, this one made the headlines as it occurred on a day with 50 mile per hour winds coming off the Charles River and tragically claimed the lives of two firefighters. The burning home in question sits across the street from mine.
My home was unharmed and through a struggle that lasted upwards of 24 hours the fire was eventually contained. However, being in a city and being in such close proximity made my family a part of the situation whether or not we wanted to be. The Internet and cable lines were cut early on and most of our news, somewhat ironically, simply came from looking out the window. For those of you that have seen fires that consume houses you know that there is more smoke than fire usually. Great, rancid plumes covered the streets in my neighborhood, while fire trucks, ambulances and police cruisers filled the streets. Strangely though, instead of fleeing an apocalyptic scene, a crowd formed on the corner of my street, iPhones held outstretched to document the whole thing.
I am no Luddite; it is hard to imagine anyone of our generation is. In many ways the integration of technology and social media into our daily lives has defined our generation, and we have changed the world for it. Usually, I would see this as a benefit. Faster communication, free information, the global spread of ideas and perspectives are all good things. Yet, as I stood looking out my window as screaming firefighters pulled one of their burned and dying brothers from an inferno I could not help but feel disgusted as a crowd recorded the whole thing.
I have been lucky enough to have seen only one person die, calmly in bed and surrounded by his family. That event had a gravitas to it. Everyone in the room understood at a human level what could be said or done in that moment. A priest was present and the family prayed and cried together. There was a code of ethics built into the situation and while the rest of the world did not know my grandfather or my family, everyone pulled over when the funeral procession drove to the graveyard.
Perhaps it was naïve of me to assume similar unwritten laws would govern the virtual world. However, it seems the codes of respect and dignity that hold true in human interaction are insufficient in the virtual world where privacy and accountability are iffy at best. I sincerely wonder whether those videos garnered likes and re-tweets in the days that followed. Did people feel validated? That maybe they had provided some kind of service? Would people feel a little unnerved to watch firefighters try to resuscitate a dying brother while people screamed for an ambulance?
We have yet to come up with ethics for our new world of social media. The tools seem to have evolved faster than our morality. Whether we like it or not, this will be an issue for our generation. The Internet is rapidly becoming less and less of the anonymous, private tool it once was. The frontier is being tamed, no longer is anything truly private and total anonymity is becoming a thing of the past. This is not such a bad thing, is it? Should we not punish hate speech on the Internet as we would if it were on the sidewalk? Why would certain laws be exempt in the virtual world?
What concerns me more is the ethics we will build in this virtual environment. As of now it seems we are sorely lacking. Hurtful personal content and often lies can be propagated at the click of a button. Things we speak about with hushed tones in person can be given a megaphone on the Internet. Hopefully, in a community or a classroom this would be met by rebukes or admonishments. People would honk at the car tailgating a hearse. The Internet does not yet have those social customs that keep us getting along in the real world day to day. It is up to us to build them. Technology is not slowing and information will only move faster. We should anticipate this. We will have to formalize it, make certain practices unacceptable not in law, but in culture. So that maybe when a firefighter dies in the street, our phones are turned to silent instead of posting to Facebook.
Artwork by AMR THAMEEN
(03/19/14 3:47pm)
“Act like a man.” I am sure that is a sentiment older male figures have expressed to any young man at some point in their lives. And I am sure the reasoning was well intentioned, even if ill-founded. I’m sure they meant ‘be brave, don’t cry and be athletic’; all those colloquial things we see personified in James Bond, Bruce Wayne or hell, even Aragorn. It is all beautifully idealistic and just a tad chauvinistic. We never have to see the failure of this idealism that we keep out of sight and mind because, well, it makes us uncomfortable.
I am not sure if I am a feminist, but I would sure like to be. I know that men possess a comparatively higher level of social, political and economic power in this country. I also hold firm that this is fundamentally wrong. Yet, I cannot speak personally to these issues, as I am not a woman. I rarely if ever fear physical violence, I have never had to worry about abuse or assault and I do not have to make a choice between my career or pregnancy. Yes, men have luxuries that are unfair and wrong. While we gain these social benefits, men too have every reason to be royally pissed off with the patriarchy.
Yes, men reap the benefits of the societal structure in place, but they suffer from it too. If we look at violent crime, for example, it comes as no real surprise that men dominate in the statistics. Men are more likely to commit and be victims of violent crime. The rate of homicide for men in 2011 was 7.4 per 100,000 citizens, women at 2.0. Do we just have a violent nature? Well that’s just the way we are, I’m sure. Why doesn’t this surprise us? It certainly does not surprise me.
Let’s move on though. Did you know men make up 93.3% of America’s prison population? Well of course they do, they’re committing more crimes! It’s just in their nature. Yes, along with the highest incomes and CEO positions, men can also claim almost complete monopoly over our prison system. Statistically this makes perfect sense as men are committing the majority of crime, or in the case of violent crime, the vast majority. Why this disparity? I am uncomfortable with the gut reaction that men are predisposed to criminal activity. Wouldn’t that be a strange thing to tell a young man that compared to his sister he is more likely to go to jail and more likely to become president.
Lastly, the number nobody wants to talk about, but remains the most horrifying yet the most unsurprising, is that men claim the vast majority of sexual abuse and assault crimes. Again, this does not surprise us. If we keep our eyes open we can see signs of this every weekend night. Or better yet, ask women about it.
So we know these things, and I am sure by now the situation looks pretty grim. As is often the case with atrocities and things that make us uncomfortable, we are often prone to looking for “good” and “bad” instead of constructive solutions. Here I sincerely believe the patriarchy has failed men too. Men are almost always the perpetrators in acts of sexual violence and I genuinely wonder why. Can you tell me? Is it just coded in to us? Too much testosterone? I would argue the rape culture persisted in our society is less a facet of that and jokes about rape (though those certainly don’t help) and maybe something more ingrained. Maybe the reason is that men are continuously bombarded with images of validation and power coming as a result of sex. Maybe it’s because James Bond is always in control and always gets the girl, and every first grader can tell you who James Bond is.
Men need to stop being complacent in their status as aggressors. Men need to be willing to hold each other accountable, to understand that the system has failed us too, has predisposed us to more successful suicide attempts, emotionally distant relationships and violent crime. Conveniently, you also fail in “being a man” when you begin to question what it means. In my limited experience, “being a man” is not what it was cracked up to be. I want no part of a stereotype that promotes abuse and violence, and neither do many of my male peers.
Men should be angry at the gender normativity they are slotted into, just as women should be. We should be furious. We should howl and scream and fight alongside feminists and anyone else who is willing to stand up to a patriarchal gender system. We may choose to brush off statistics and stereotypes by claiming well, that’s not me; so I appeal to your sense of selfishness. Men, you have a reason to be pissed off and you should let the world know about it.
(03/05/14 4:58pm)
I had the unique opportunity of speaking at The Moth this past Thursday (the Moth, for those of you who don’t know, is a live story telling event held in the Gamut Room). The experience proved to be extraordinarily fun and exciting, yet I realized something as I stood up there recounting my tale. The loudest laughs, the greatest applauses, the most visible signs of excitement all came from a particular group. It was the latest batch of baby Febs who had shown up and beyond all logic seemed generally attentive to what I had to say.
Now I do not mean to judge Febs as stereotypically more enthusiastic. After all, we are all excited about being in college when we first get here. In truth, my fascination was less a product of them (sorry, Febs) than of an internal trouble. Here I was two years into college and what had happened to all my enthusiasm? My genuine optimism? My eagerness to participate? Had I even had any of that to begin with?
I am convinced the mid-Midd crisis is a thing. It happened to me slowly, quietly, and so subtly that I did not even notice it. No, it was my parents that noticed. They pulled me aside a couple times and asked vague questions like “How are things?” “Is anything bothering you?” and “You seem off?” With mental illness now getting the awareness it deserves, I am lucky to have such attentive parents. I had no clear answers for them though. Nothing seemed particularly wrong; my grades were good, my friends were good and everything was fine. Just fine. Nothing was bothering me and nothing was making me excited. The emotional plateau I hit mid-college was odd to experience and even odder to get away from.
We change as time goes by here, or at least I hope we do. We get smarter, more mature, and more confident. In theory we have more figured out, at least in terms of our academic interests. Yet there are dangerous pitfalls at this stage of the college experience just as there were at the beginning, and I am sure there will be towards the end. Enthusiasm wanes and Middlebury becomes, in a sense, disenchanting. Classes seem to blur together and academic life follows a predictable routine. Even weekends seem deeply scheduled procedures, pre-game, actual game, post-game, Grille, sleep, wake up at 1, rinse and repeat.
The trouble is that upon hitting the mid-Midd crisis, we cannot buy ourselves a Porsche and drive across America. Nope, we are still stuck here, going through the paces of a college experience that has stopped surprising us. The worst thing anyone can feel about college is that they are wasting their time. Apathy and boredom are our greatest enemies here, not alcohol or midterms. So what is left for us to do? We have to confront the age-old riddle of “Here I stand. What shall I do?” That is the only question that matters. What is to be done? We may love our routines, but even so, they should be broken at times. Can we change ourselves? Or must we rely on familiar faces, classes and experiences? Why not give something else a shot?
If I were to prescribe a remedy to this (and I am by no means out of my mid-Midd crisis) I would start with people. Yes, people. When we count our blessings here, it usually comes in the form of beautiful buildings, brilliant professors and a point free dining system. Rarely do we look to our peers as sources of inspiration or uniqueness. Expanding our social circles is never a bad thing and gives us new avenues to re-invention. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to be like our peers, whether it be trying to recapture underclassman enthusiasm or the reserved intellect of seniors in our classes. Often we hesitate, perhaps out of pride, to exemplify profoundly good qualities we see in other people.
Experience has to be the second component of escaping the mid-Midd crisis. Change for the sake of change is often thought of as bad, in terms of the college experience, however, I disagree. Sometimes change for the sake of change is necessary, even if it turns out for the worse. Better we make a mistake now, surrounded by great institutions and people, than later, no? Changing our everyday experience may be as simple as conscientiously making discussion sections about the group and not the individual, going out of your way to say hi to people you have just met or, in my case, telling a story about Glitter at the Moth.
The mid-Midd crisis can leave us jaded and apathetic if we let it run its course. If we see it and acknowledge it, then at least we have a chance to make our middle chapters at Middlebury just as profound, just as exciting as the first weeks we were here.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(02/19/14 7:00pm)
I am sure that many of you, like me, fall into certain familial rituals after spending a few days back home on break. Laundry is done in collective family-sized loads, your normal dinner schedule is thrown horribly out of sync or perhaps you must perpetually update your parents as to your whereabouts, even if you are just running out to the corner store. Yes, all the old familiar childhood traditions come flooding back no matter how old you are. As good and grateful children, I am sure we all go along with the rules of the house. Well, at least some of them.
I was raised Catholic, and everyone in my family is a practicing Catholic. Back in Sicily, the old country, we have found the Catholic Church where our great-grandparents knelt and prayed. We are of that unique old breed that blends culture and religious tradition into a humorous and often comforting way of life. Our Christmas Eves are filled with seven different types of fish (don’t ask me why) and our Easters always feature enough lamb to feed a family twice the size of ours. Certain cookies are made at certain types of the year for certain festivals and feast days and I am sure it all seems very quaint. The cultural Catholic overtones in my family were present for a solid eighteen years of my life, and I never much questioned the process, from baptism to communion to confirmation. Yet, I was not surprised in the least to look back at my two years in college and find I have never once gone to Mass of my own accord. Meanwhile the Sunday morning ritual of Mass in my home has become remarkably more difficult to justify, even if only to please my mother.
What precipitated my spiritual deterioration? Was I never really spiritual to begin with? Was it all just pomp and circumstance associated with familial custom? We all adjust ourselves to the newfound freedoms of college in some manner or another, yet shouldn’t faith be a source of comfort and stability in a new environment? Now to be fair, I still call myself Catholic and probably will continue identifying that way. I just don’t go to Mass. It still counts though, right? In fact, the more and more I reflect critically on my faith I find I have little issue with much of what Jesus Christ said and moreover find myself spiritually moved by reading passages in the Bible. The actual going to Church seems to be the problem
I will never make the claim that liberal education leads students to atheism or agnosticism. It does, however, nurture a deep sense of critical and analytic interpretation in us. This is not held to the books, articles or journals we experience in the classroom but is employed in everything we interact with like media, art or human opinion. My faith is not exempt from critical interpretation, nor should it be. My issue with Catholicism is not that I do not find it to be spiritually motivating; it is that I am asked to put aside my own powers of interpretation in favor of a priest’s. As a man of faith, I seem to be relegated to listener instead of active participant. At times this is not an issue. I have heard Jesuits and incredibly intelligent priests make connections in Biblical text that I would not otherwise have made. I find it more difficult to sit through an hour of Church when I am asked to listen to a point of view and consider it, while giving no response.
My liberal education seems to get me in trouble in my perfect world, though it should not. As I am sure many of you have seen in the news, Pope Francis has made quite a stir in renewing a community and poverty focus in the Catholic Church. He inspires me and makes me want to revisit and re-experience my faith. Pope Francis, though, has shown that he is capable of interpreting doctrine differently than what was once set in stone, has combatted some of the more hierarchical extravagances of the Vatican. He presents a reinvented version of Catholicism the world sorely needs, a Church focused on service, moderation and dedication to fighting poverty.
My faith is not perfect; there is a laundry list of issues and political stances I, and many others, are quick to identify as wrong. Gay marriage, abstinence and women’s rights are all things that are in dire need of improvement. I would like to not let these things discount my faith project as a whole. My hope is that a liberal education can amplify my faith, and allow me to seek and discover why I actually consider myself a Catholic, rather than just considering it a cultural identity.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(01/16/14 12:46am)
I am very comfortable with myself, thank you very much. I like to think I am confident with who and where I am. Do I regret not studying abroad? Me? Why would I ever regret something like that? You must have me confused with some other less confident person! Okay, fine; maybe just a little kind of sort of dreading the semester when most of my people depart, leaving me flannel clad, exactly where I have been for the last two years.
Perhaps dread is too strong a word. In truth, I have looked for reasons to regret sticking around and have come up with few. After all, we do spend two years or so trying to figure college out only to decide that it is time for a break. On a more personal level, I feel I have earned my position as a junior Feb. I made it through angsty freshman weekends and sophomore slumps to reach the good life. I’m nearly legal, I get to go skiing any time I like and do work I genuinely find fascinating. What’s not to like?
Now I enjoy my friends, my sense of home and setting down my roots, so studying abroad was never truly in the cards for me. What I find particularly troubling is not that I am missing out on some great experience, but that people leave for reasons not necessarily abroad but here in Middlebury. The narrative of fantastic new lands to explore rarely seems to match the reality. It seems to be far more common for Middkids to leave because they simply want out of Middlebury for some time and see going abroad as that escape. I understand that, but that exchange seems to carry consequences beyond changing your country of residence for a few months.
As the first wave of my fellow juniors return there is a common theme in their response to “how was your study abroad?” There’s usually a blank stare, maybe a few ums and ahs and then, “It was good. Really good.” When pressed for details they are noncommittal and vague and you quickly look for a way out of the conversation.
I exaggerate, but in these responses there is another untold story: loneliness, hardship and genuine difficulty, and not the kind that builds character. Studying abroad is not the luxurious, adventurous experience we want it to be. It certainly can be, if done for the right reasons. A passion for a certain region and the chance for academic progress at different institutions are fantastic reasons. Needing to get out of Middlebury or simply because it seems to be the thing to do tend towards these stories of melancholic loneliness in a foreign land.
I wonder if part of it is just the need to reset. You get to return and reinvent yourself, give people time to grow up or work on themselves. But why do we choose that way to do it? Why not simply travel? Take time and go places and see things you want to see. Experience regions and cultures without the looming academic rigor. Go and take the experience you truly want, not the one imagined by the grandeur of studying abroad. Are we really convinced after all that at an academic level these schools outdo Middlebury? A handful, sure, but all of them?
I do not mean to simply rant at our study abroad system. In truth I think it provides some incredible experiences for the right people. If students want to have terrific experiences abroad they need a better reason than wanting to leave Middlebury. And we can’t ignore the very real challenges that being in a foreign country presents. This takes tenacious, outgoing people with global mindsets and usually quite a bit of optimism. I lack many of those things. So when asked whether or not I am study abroad I am comfortable with my response. For me, that experience of loneliness and melancholy seems to be more real than an incredible time abroad.
We have a terrific luxury in our ability to travel around the world and we would be misusing our time if we did not do it as often as we could. There is time for travel and experience beyond studying abroad though. For those of us considering it, I hope there is a sincere reflection on the motivation to study abroad so we can hopefully avoid summing up what should be terrific experiences with, “It was really good.”
(12/05/13 1:49am)
Ah, Thanksgiving: a time for giving thanks for friends, food and family; a time when we can put aside our differences and come to terms over pie and turkey. It is one of the most noble of traditions. It is also the weekend when your little sister comes home from college and tells you that an online app based on reviews by women has judged you an 8.4.
She brought it up so innocently. Oh Andrew, have you heard of Lulu? You should really see this, you’re on it. Wait, wow, hang on, how could I be on something I have not even signed up for? As it turns out, even millennials can be baffled by the power of social media. For those of you still in the dark, “Lulu” is an app that rates men. That’s right – based on anonymous user reviews men are rated out of ten for categories like personality, ambition and looks. This is also done without the knowledge of poor, unwitting individuals like myself. If that’s the taste of vomit in the back of your throat, you are probably reacting similarly to me.
I am not going to point out the fairly obvious one-way street involved here; you can probably figure them out for yourself. What disturbs me more is that my privacy, my made up character, whatever firsthand impression I may have made, has just been jettisoned into the Internet without me even knowing. I will concede that there is an opt-out button if you go the website. However, the only reason I knew this rating and picture combination existed was because my sister stumbled across it. Otherwise I would have passed on in blissful ignorance.
There are some seriously messed up things here that we can point out and condemn. My character being boiled down to a number, preying on people’s ignorance, playing to gender binaries, the list can go on and on. It should go on and on too, if ever there was a reason to be royally ticked off I’d suggest now. But let us back up a little and address a perhaps more overlooked issue in this mess.
I am under the sincere belief this is just as damaging for women as for men. Like most of the social media world you can attach hashtags. Yep, a number was not enough to sum up my personality. We had to resort to hashtags.
One of my personal favorites that sat in my “good” box was #NotADick. (#NerdyButILikeIt and #CanTalkWithMyDad were close runner ups). As a college male, I am woefully unprepared to assume what women look for in men. However, I know as a human being that #NotADick should not be a plus. Shouldn’t that be the norm? Is that really a plus factor for someone?
As flattered as I am with my 8.4 rating and my various hashtags I am also profoundly insulted that I can be made into a number out of ten. I would like to think of myself as more than #NotADick, though I am sure many of you would disagree with that and I am sure you have very good reasons. The vague nature of this kind of thing gives no real specificity. Was I having a bad day? Did you catch me at a particularly good or bad time? How well does this reviewer honestly know me and what then gives them the right to assess my character out of ten? At least for college applications we got to write a personal essay.
This is social media at its very worst. We should not take this kind of nonsense seriously, yet some people clearly do. It worries me that we have become insular in strange ways that looking at a number online and assessing someone is somehow more potent than sitting down and having a conversation. I would challenge any one of you to sum up your character in a number out of ten, but you would all fail because people, as we all know, are difficult to understand.
Lulu is trash and hurtful to men and women. This is not something to which I need to draw your attention. We know about things like cyber bullying and other fallout from social media, yet I have never come across something so deliberately degrading, even if presenting itself under the guise of a “healthy” way for girls to know about guys. Respond to this by getting to genuinely know people. Numbers are not made to describe human beings. I am not and will never be an 8.4.
(11/13/13 7:03pm)
In all our high level seminars, hours in the library and dusty tomes on our bookshelves, have we missed something? Has our education here left something out? Something, perhaps, more elusive than a GPA or a thesis? Does Middlebury create smarter people or better people?
This is a somewhat melancholy road to go down. It is difficult to conceive that after all we have gone through at college whether it is emotional, physical or spiritual that somehow, something crucial was left out. It is far easier to believe that we are continually bettered by our work here. Still, I find it difficult to find that logic true. I struggle to conceive how my reading great authors or writing papers makes me a better person. Or do we simply rely on the age-old testament that being more knowledgeable makes you better?
In some cases this may be the case. How could we contribute to positive debate in the world around us if we did not have the tools for rhetoric and discussion? Knowledge in that sense gives us options. It gives us the freedom to engage in certain material, to influence, convince and discover – all things we already know. But knowledge alone does not teach us morality or leadership or compassion. On that topic our Middlebury education remains remarkably silent.
It seems those are what we need most at times and find ourselves sorely lacking. We may be straight-A students, but what good is that if we find ourselves ambivalent about the world around us? What use, then, is a Middlebury degree except to satisfy our academic ambition? It all seems rather selfish. Of course, I don’t blame Middlebury for this; it is just the convenient example. This question of teaching morality and leadership could apply to any educational institution. It is something we sorely lack but has forever been left to the realm of personal experience instead of academic.
Most of us inherit the morality of people most present in our lives: friends, family, the people who raised us. I did and it certainly was not perfect. Love your family, provide for yourself, do what you love and work hard. Not bad things, but there’s other more subtle things too, bits of personality less desirable. Fight the people who fight your brothers, stick to your own people, don’t talk about unpleasant things, never let the world see you sweat. The morality I picked up instead looks like a kind of personal code that does not quite cut it. How can I be given an education, be given knowledge that is rare and powerful, but no way to effectively use it?
It is the recurring trope of a liberal arts education that we become worldly and exposed to all matter of subject material. I can only assume this stretches beyond the bounds of mere academia. Yet we rarely act on it. Patience, moderation and confidence seem to be subjects we have trouble with, as any Friday night will tell you. Imagine all the issues on this campus that could be solved if we taught leadership and compassion in the same way we approached humanities and science. Would men still be aggressors on drunken evenings or would we be bound by a sense of moderation and character? Would we need rash displays of activism to tell us about injustices in the world or on our doorstep? Instead most of those moral lessons come from outside the positive structure of academic experience and from personal experience and, everyone’s favorite, the media.
I’m not sure how you teach morality well. I’m sure part of the reason morality is ignored is how slippery it is to define and enact. But there are some tried and true ways to go about it. One of the biggest is making community inescapable. In a place as small as our campus you would think this would be the default, yet there are bitter divides of class and ideology that set us apart and stress our individualism. If we each held a responsibility to benefit the whole, perhaps lack of morality would be better understood as having negative effects on ourselves too. This also falls in line with being able to feel for others. Sympathy and pity rarely bring us to constructive places. Instead, community should bring profound empathy, difficult to articulate and even more so to enact.
So, dear reader, ask yourself what have you not learned in your education here? I sincerely believe being able to identify what you don’t know will do you far better than labeling all the things you do. Maybe then we can fill in the blanks and address the gaps where morality has been left out of our education.