It's Still a Beautiful Dartmouth
As Max Ehrmann wrote in his poem Desiderata, "Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story." One thing I have learned about Dartmouth students in the course of the recently concluded elections is that far too often we claim an individual monopoly on the truth. I think the problem that goes along with that is constantly expecting the worst from one another. But it should not have taken the elections to make that clear to me; all of us behave like that way too often. How many times a day do we hear someone say something terrible about someone else's motivation or character in passing, or even utter something like that to one of our friends? Candidates in this year's elections have been called some of the worst things in the book and I'm sure that some of them don't think highly of each other when all is said and done. But I think the first thing we forget when we go on the attack is that we're talking about (or to) another Dartmouth student. Every person here has an interior life and issues that no one else on this campus knows about. We are quick to forget our own failings and even quicker to judge.