Returning from a job interview in New York City, I swung by the Hinman Boxes to get my mail and opened up last Friday's The Dartmouth. After reading the Weekend Gazette's Feature on eating and exercise at Dartmouth, I found myself getting angry at the realistic portrayal of the starving women on our campus, many of them my own friends.
I, too, wasted two of my four years at Dartmouth struggling to maintain an unrealistically thin body. I consider myself lucky that I somehow came to the realization that happiness is not wearing a size two, but is something from within. Still, there are too many victims. If we are a community, we must fight this problem the same way that we fight date rape or racism.
Dartmouth has seen three suicides in the past year. These were deaths that made many of us question the role of our community in protecting one another from such incomprehensible despair. Eating disorders are another form of suicide -- a slower form, but it is suicide all the same. Why aren't we taking action against such a problem? Why are we letting this happen?
Last week Newsweek published an article on the rising costs of higher education. The article estimated that the total bill at a private institution such as Dartmouth costs $1,000 a week.
In other words, an $1,000 a week suicide. Our malnourished and suffering friends aren't learning what they could be in their classes, their brains aren't functioning -- and when they do, it's only to calculate miles run, calories burned and pounds lost.
Sometimes I have questioned my anger -- I too want to be thin and attractive. Don't we all? But when will we recognize that this is a postmodern holocaust? Hitler killed six million Jews in World War II -- anorexia and bulimia claim just as many victims today.
I've spent the past two terms writing columns -- all of them funny, or at least trying to be. This column is decidedly not humorous.
Lately, I can't bring myself to write another trite 500 words on fraternity boys, drinking and Dartmouth idiosyncrasies. None of it occupies my mind the way this does.
I'm going to graduate in five weeks (unless something drastic happens), and quite honestly I can't wait to leave. I need to get away from what to me is an infectious disease.
It's not that Dartmouth hasn't been full of wonderful moments, it has been, but there have also been times like these where I feel helpless and angry. I am confident that I will go out in the world and be successful, but I am less sure for some of my friends.
What does this mean?
The generation before us paved the road so that women could go to schools like Dartmouth and succeed in a male dominated world. And here we are destroying that opportunity. The quest to be thin is far more compelling than the quest to be a lawyer, doctor, teacher or writer -- to follow our real dreams.
Last Friday's Weekend Gazette on eating disorders was only an illustration of a very serious problem. Now we must take action. If your friend was drowning you would try to save them. First you would throw them a rope. Then you would try to toss them something to float on.
And if all else failed, you would jump in the water and save them, risking your life against the current.
We must jump in the water as a community. Letting the victims of anorexia and bulimia "just float" isn't enough anymore.
