I first heard the name “Andrew Lohse” from chatter among my friends in FoCo — “Have you read that article? Disgusting.” — and pulled the story up on my phone. I paused among the hordes as I got into the more disturbing bits of the hazing scandal, shocked that I was standing in a place where such things may have happened. I remember walking across campus with an uncertain sense of uneasiness. I would look at people, mostly affiliated men, and wonder if they hazed or had been hazed. The thought that my classmates and friends might have participated in something like that left me numb.
Flash forward to this week’s appalling incident — after the Real Talk scandal, after the Bored at Baker bomb threat, after I myself had started going on Bored at Baker — and the only numbness I felt as I stood at Monday’s community gathering was the cold wind hitting my face. That is not to say that I don’t sympathize for the victim, or that I don’t condemn the actions of the perpetrator. However, I am no longer shocked that something like this could happen on our picturesque campus. Maybe it is because the “jaded junior” phase of my college career is finally settling in — or maybe I have just gotten used to campus scandal.
I cannot explain exactly why I feel detached from what has happened recently. Personally, I feel like this is the most shocking and horrendous of all the things I have seen at Dartmouth thus far, so logically I should be the most emotionally jarred and attached. Contrary to the Lohse case, though, I went straight from hearing the news to being ready to engage in discussions about it. I immediately had an opinion, passing the “numbness” stage altogether. No longer did I need time to process the event, despite its horrifying nature.
Though this might be explained by my relative separation from the event — I had been out of the country in the fall and knew no freshmen — some of my close friends have experienced sexual assault and harassment, so it is not as if the developments were foreign to me. Instead, I think this is a manifestation of two concepts I have “learned” at Dartmouth, though I would never have expected these lessons to come from my college education.
First, I have mastered the convenient talent of intellectualizing any social issue, no matter how personally connected I am to it. Perhaps the unfortunate succession of scandalous events since my matriculation has desensitized me to the actual impacts they have had on our community. In any event, I now know how to push empathy aside in an effort to be able to discuss an event’s implications immediately. News has moved from hitting me first in the gut to right in the brain. So much importance is put on being able to discuss and articulate your “side” of the argument that I am afraid I have lost sight of the more important issue at hand: that one of our classmates has lost her sense of personal safety.
Second, I am no longer surprised by the potential for individual malice and depravity, as I once was as a “naïve” freshman. It is difficult to feel the “outrage” that Sadia Hassan ’13 (“Where is the Outrage?” Feb. 10) rightly noted was missing when the posting was mostly an amalgamation of hateful speech I had witnessed before (on Bored at Baker and elsewhere). After using Bored at Baker and hearing of incidents of intolerance and hate from my friends, this sort of thought is not surprising. Granted, it comes from a small, though despicable, minority, but that dark undercurrent is just as much a part of Dartmouth as last weekend’s Winter Carnival festivities.
My heart goes out to the victim of the latest shocking series of events, as well as to anyone who feels unsafe as a result of it. If you are like me, I ask you to refrain from conceptualizing this event and keep in mind that none of us are removed from it. Engaging in discussion is important, but we need to ensure that we do not forget that these events happen to our neighbors.
