Unfortunately, the more opinion columns I write, the more absurd I feel. It seems like everything that gets published on this page is hackneyed from overuse -- sort of old, weathered and slushy. And here I am adding my two cents' worth. It's all a bit of a joke.
I think that most of you would agree -- at least the seniors among you -- that we are past the point where it's okay to ascribe wholeheartedly to a totalizing opinion or belief. At this point, we know that we are never fully right about anything; we may not be wrong, but, in any given situation, there are many valid points of view.
And yet day after day opinion columns, campus-wide movements and student organizations proclaim: "We are right; you are wrong."
Then the campus goes haywire with racist newspaper headlines, antagonistic posters, ridiculous rallies and a whole lot of hullabaloo that includes a long, unbearably boring letter from the president. In all my four years here at Dartmouth, this process has not changed. At the end of all the fighting and chicanery, everyone simply consolidates their views and reassumes their formerly established positions.
Regrettably, by the time you recognize this endless cycle for what it is, you are graduating, and in your place is someone ready to jump headfirst into the fray.
At first, the incessant bickering on campus bothered me, especially since it never seemed to lead to any noticeable change. Ultimately, though, I'm fine with it, because each of our ridiculous progressions from outraged and opinionated to understanding yet firm in our beliefs is as much a part of Dartmouth as DOC trips or the Greek system.
The truth is that when you get to college, the continuity of the earlier stages of your life gets disrupted and all of a sudden you find yourself starting from scratch. In high school, you were simply "yourself," without any doubt or self-awareness. Over the years, surrounded by family and close friends, you unwittingly managed to bring your self-image into harmony with what other people thought of you. For some reason, everyone in high school seems to share a certain set of core values; for better or for worse, those core values are generally organized around two universal scales: one that measures intelligence and another that measures popularity. In high school, everyone knows who is popular and who is smart.
In college, however, when 4,000 strangers come together, those standards and common values disappear -- as they should at our age -- and the harmony that once existed between one's self-image and what everyone else thinks gets disrupted. The scales of popularity and intelligence explode, only to be replaced by a million intricate, inexplicable measurements of character.
All of a sudden you find yourself being swept through life in a formless state, faced with the prospect of carving out a new position in a new environment. And so, many students -- in an attempt to reestablish the harmony that once existed between their interior and exterior senses of self -- become parodies of themselves. They take on strong and often antagonizing opinions to exaggerate their defining traits, because by setting themselves up in opposition to others, they believe that they can locate themselves in a firm, unambiguous position within the Dartmouth community.
Gradually, as we get older, we learn to shed our antagonizing opinions and affected traits. Eventually, we start to feel comfortable with who we are, and we no longer feel the need to validate our sense of self through conflict and opposition.
Instead, we become confident enough to say, "This is what I believe, not because I think you're wrong, but because I know I'm not."
But by then it's usually time for us to move on and graduate, to stop writing for the opinion page and to let other, more aggressive personalities take over.