Dartmouth students, I've suffered the last "Reply-All" plea during a blitz war: "Please remove me from this list. Stop clogging my inbox."
It seems amazing, that we, the leaders of the next generation, cannot plumb our resourcefulness for some way to rid ourselves of such an epidemic (swine flu joke)! As if, in the near future, we may hope to encounter some button, some glorious device, intended to lift the heavy burden of excessive e-mail from our oppressed minds.
Face it: your inbox can't, and never will, be clogged. Simply highlight your unwanted epistle, and press "delete." Or, Mac people, who love bragging about your tactile, user-friendly environment, orphan the newborn blitz in the trash bin. You have successfully unclogged your inbox.
To those students who claim that they are too busy, too taxed, too troubled, to go about this activity, heed my invective.
Recently, one student wrote during a blitz war: "Come on, I have to deal with this crap all the time and some of us are really busy. I'm trying to study. Stop blitzing, or take me off this list."
But, dear dissenter, a blitz war is a unique cultural phenomenon -- a way for unrelated students to interact, to prove their merit, to relish the spirit of spontaneity and the creative essence.
A blitz war mirrors the assembled chaos of the Internet, which we all love. On these grounds alone, it should be a welcome respite from your busy life.
And the selfishness and irony of the "take me off" blitz is the best part -- in order to relieve yourself from having to read pointless blitzes, you've sent out a wholly self-serving, pointless blitz for everyone to read. And it is a fruitless task -- no one will remove you from the list, but will only mock your rigidity and undeserved sense of privilege.
It's kind of like a real war, and the blitz war is the draft, with complaining blitzers as congressmen's sons. And now, I'm Creedence Clearwater Revival. Consider this entire article a "reply-all" to your blitz. In the future, I will be blitzbombing you with these 650 words repeatedly.
But my bile isn't solely intended for those who eschew the pleasure of a blitz war, and insist on some legendary form of e-mail etiquette. Here, I protest the culture of feigned business. I object to the manufactured, impossibly-packed schedules that allow people to claim that checking e-mail -- and maintaining their inbox's cleanliness -- is too much for them. The jam-packed schedule is the same scapegoat that allows us to lose track of old friends, that gives us excuses to miss events, that makes us feel free to back out of obligations. I am certainly not innocent, but accept that I'm in a self-critical phase.
We are not wedded to the nine-to-five grind, but so many of our peers consider it necessary to create one for themselves. I understand that on-campus jobs can often be five-hour-a-day commitments. Sports teams take up a huge amount of time. I don't challenge that we are busy people.
However, we have internalized the self-righteousness of the worker bee mentality, and it is exposed within the aforementioned phenomenon. If you were busy, you'd log off Blitzmail. But you can't be that busy, because you're on Blitz. And you have the time to respond to a blitz with the claim of being over-worked. Hoist with your own petard, sir.
Dartmouth, we have to stop taking ourselves so seriously. How important are we? We students may be accomplished within our controlled world, we may be heroes to high schoolers, but we are still in the Petri dish of Dartmouth. A lot of people don't even do their own laundry, and many students would have trouble feeding themselves if it weren't for prepared foods at campus cafeterias. Here, the worries of the world are often removed. It's a luxury that the plaintive blitzers so often forget.
Count your blessings. And yes, the blitz war is one of them.
