If there's one thing Dartmouth loves, it's Dartmouth. As a relatively self-interested person, I know self-loving when I see it. I mean, just look at this issue of The Mirror isolating our "unique" culture from the rest of the world in its own unalterable sphere of traditions is more of a tradition than our actual traditions. As freshmen lured in by the freshman rite-of-passage song-and-dance celebratory musical numbers, we enter this school with pre-instilled cultural definitions. We then unwittingly continue to cultivate this absurd separate sphere that no one but a fellow Dartmouth student could understand.
When are we going to realize that we're not that different and not that special? The post-Orientation realization that no, this place isn't Hogwarts/Disneyland/heaven takes people a surprisingly long time to get, and in fact, a lot of us struggle to simply get through classes and work because we're here primarily as academic students. Slowly we realize that our perception of utopia is actually a monotonous routine kind of like gym, tan, laundry.
Sure, there are pervasive cultural characteristics indigenous to Dartmouth on this campus. It's hard to take 10 steps on FFB without someone's flair-y butt in your face. No other school plays pong, and sure we make a big snow sculpture once a year.
But if you haven't realized, alcohol abuse and "crazy" colored outfits are prevalent on most college campuses in this country. Adults pregame too. Booting and rallying is a nearly universal trait of alcoholism. The terms "A-side" and "B-side" were first used to differentiate songs on vinyl records in the 1950s. Blitz is named after how much time was put into coding it.
And we just can't seem to shut up about how special and unique our unique Dartmouth culture is. This masturbatory and obnoxious pep and cheer regarding Dartmouth culture becomes our culture itself we spend more time celebrating our difference than actually being different.
We hype up this ritualistic summer camp experience with constant ego-stroking and self-congratulating. We seem to think that we are simply the summation of our positive "special" traits, rather than being critically conscious and self-reflective. We turn on those with opinions that are even slightly contradictory to our projected happiness.
We convince ourselves that we must be completely happy with everything at Dartmouth.
And this unique Dartmouth culture we love so much only allows us to further isolate ourselves from the real world. We're setting ourselves up to be even more socially incompetent we'll remain those assholes who go to parties back at home only to complain loudly when everyone's playing beirut and belligerently ransack the kitchen in search of stacked Dixie bowls to use as makeshift paddle substitutes. We're going to spend the rest of our lives hanging out at that one bar in Murray Hill where Dartmouth alums play "real" pong.
Anthropomorphized, Dartmouth is that kid in elementary school who was overly encouraged to like himself for no good reason, and so he grew to be socially incompetent and attention needy when he should never have received attention in the first place unless he earned it. But now, no one realizes the root of his neediness because they assume that he's an adult and knows better, and so he has to spend all of his time misunderstood, on the Green, with a silly costume attempting to mature despite the consequences of his misguided childhood.
