I wanted to write a Wespeak regarding my thoughts on the final weeks of the semester. How appropriately collegiate I feel when I walk through Olin and I see so many laptops with research paper writers attached to them. Everyone reading J-STOR articles, and groups of friends sharing studying snacks; it’s an amusing sight to behold. I wanted to muse a little about how seriously we take the end of the semester, only to start a new one again in January. I wanted to think about how all the students cringe as we sit to take “Blue Book” exams after staying up unreasonably late, drinking caffeine. I came here to write a Wespeak like this one, but when I opened my computer I saw I had received a New York Times news alert, informing me, “Gunman Opens Fire at Omaha Mall,” and I clicked the link to learn that eight people had been shot.
My first thought was that the gunman successfully picked the busiest time of the year, when flocks of automaton consumers head to their local mega-malls to buy whichever items have been successfully advertised as the ideal (read: meaningful) present for a loved one. As soon as I had the thought about crowded malls and herds of targets, I cringed: I felt guilty that my gut reaction to the villainous headline was jaded and unsympathetic. So I started to read the article on nytimes.com when I came to a paragraph that started, “The shootings broke the usually banal routine of holiday shopping.” This sentence caught me completely off-guard. It struck me as critical of Christmas-driven consumerism and all together suspicious of holiday mass culture: an opinion I never suspected those outside academic/intellectual life, or deeply cynical people, to hold. I guess I sometimes think that my professors and my friends here at Wesleyan make up the small percentage of critical thinkers we have left in America. Everyone outside of these liberal institutions buys the bullshit fed to us on the TV, right? Everyone else out there, who is not sitting in Olin writing research papers on Foucault’s “Penopticon,” or on Yeats’ “Second Coming,” they buy into all the consumer-driven holiday hype, right?
Upon re-reading this argument, and re-reading the sentence that originally caught my attention, I realized what an elitist standpoint I took in believing only wealthy educated liberals realize that consumerism is meaningless. So, I realized that my impression with the sentence was not about the “routine of holiday shopping,” but with banal routines in general. It’s almost as if you avoid the public sector, you have a better chance of avoiding random acts of terror. The DC sniper targeted victims pumping gas, and E. Coli breaks out at Jack in the Box. Is there something to be said about staying in higher education, gaining a liberal education and staying more fit because of it?
I know the correlation I am trying to make is fragile at best. But I sometimes think of how lucky I am to go to college in America. I then think about how lucky I am to live in America; a place where (so far, at least) we do not worry about suicide bombers. Seeing my peers worrying about their grades, their exams and their stress, I think it’s a natural feeling to want to turn to freaking-out college students to tell them to take a breath, and realize that there are more important issues going on than our semester grades. Eight people were randomly killed today. How could we make sense of this? I guess I will say that, I hope, while everyone is preparing for finals in the upcoming week, we can enjoy what we’re learning and live a more responsible and engaging life because of it.
(I have to tell you that in the 20 minutes of writing this article, the original link that said, “The shootings broke the usually banal routine of holiday shopping” had been taken out of the Omaha shooting A1 reporting. I guess an editor realized someone had been reading too much Don DeLillo for the tastes of the NYTimes readers).
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