[Today's entry is by Joel Cretan, a frosh at school, as told to me]
College: A time for minds to bloom. So when Dan asked me to contribute to The Enfranchised, I knew I could come up with something interesting to say. Until I couldn't. It was then I realized: college is a way to keep us down. I should be able to spin philosophical dialogue between Locke and Rousseau, but instead I spend all my time fighting between Ken and Ryu.
I'm not alone. If I were a sole soul lost in a sea of my own creation, you'd owe me no pity. But look at my peers: How many Nobel Prizes were lost to that bottle of Winner's Cup? How many Pulitzer Prize-winning novels have been forgotten while playing Halo 2? And since Devo was two decades ago, will I really be able to get any musical inspiration doing Whip-Its?
And so it seems that college is the Great Equalizer. Take an inspired young man, give him ten weeks of the Nintendo-and-Stoli prescription, and you make him turn his 20-unit Honors Quarter into a charade of 15 units (thank you golf and Band!) And while I'm out sipping my martinis and riding my polo ponies, the lower class can figure out how to throw off the yoke of oppression!
Except, it's not only been my studies that have suffered. I used to volunteer. I taught janitors how to read. Fuck. I would climb into trees and rescue kittens while at the same time performing the Heimlich maneuver on an infant. I was a Golden God. My Facebook profile still says that my interests include saving AIDS orphans from ethnic cleansing, but it’s been a while since I’ve gotten around to that. Now I just control a 1" by 1" pixilated rendering of an Italian plumber and call it a night. How are they going to set fire to the symbols of our bourgeois control when they can't read the instructions on the match
books? (Hint: "Close cover before striking.")
There comes a moment in every man's life, and I fear that for me it comes right now, when he begins to understand Trickle Down economics. So, to the rest of you, I give you this warning: skip college, and beat us up when you see me on the street. And to college: you have wasted the finest minds of our generations, and in so doing damned our society to perpetual similitude.
-Joel Cretan
P.S. In case you're wondering, Ryu always wins. Ken's such a pretty boy. For Ryu, the fight is everything.
3 comments:
"For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach--and that for the sake of dishonest gain. Even one of their own prophets has said, 'Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.' This testimony is true."
--Titus 1:10-13
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