January 25, 2011

• The World is a Vampire: 1995 to Today

  
  When I was a freshman in college I lived in the dormitories.  The dorms at the University of California, San Diego were arranged in suites with six dorm rooms sharing a common living area and bathroom.  There were eight students per suite (two double rooms and four single rooms).  The demographic of my suite was mostly representative of the demographics of UCSD and La Jolla, California (the town in which UCSD is in):  four white guys and four Asian guys.  Across the hall from our suite was a girls’ suite, whose demographics closely matched ours.  We all got along well, but mostly we just got together to (in this exact order) watch Friends, study chemistry, get drunk on Boone wine coolers, pretend to like gangsta rap, and theorize about partying at a place called “San Diego State”.  This was, for the most part, the extent of having a good time at the most conservative research university in the the most conservative town in the most conservative big city in California in 1995.

  There was one person in this assemblage of Asian and white students who didn’t hang out as much.  His name was Peter and he lived in the dorm room next to mine.  He was the archetype loner who rarely talked to anyone and mostly kept to himself.  When he did speak it was usually about something that no one cared about:  physics, his bicycle, or the fact that his Discman never skipped no matter how hard he dropped it.  He had no friends and wasn’t involved with any clubs or fraternities.  He wasn’t particularly nice, but he wasn’t overtly rude.  He was socially inept; one time he was laughing so hard at his own bad joke (that no one understood) that he farted.  He never mentioned any existence of a family.  Other than that he was just a quiet white kid with shaggy hair.  Oh, and he liked to wear trench coats and listen to Smashing Pumpkins’ Bullet with Butterfly Wings while locked in his dorm room all day long.

  You may be thinking that I am heading toward a bad ending with this narrative about a weirdo named Peter.  He probably sounds like the kind of guy who spent all his time in his dorm room devising anarchic plans while listening to angry rock music.  You may think that he’s your prototypical mass murderer who carries semi-automatic weapons in his coat and shoots students in the middle of biology lecture.  Peter never did that.  As far as I know, he graduated with an engineering degree and went on with his life.  More important than the fact that Peter never killed anyone was the feeling that no one ever feared that he would.

  That was the climate of college campuses fifteen years ago, but it’s drastically different today.  If my college experienced were transferred from 1995 to 2011, I assume that we would all be batshit scared of Peter.  Back then, weirdos were just weirdos.  Nowadays, weirdos are nutcases that people want to hide from.  On January 8, 2011, college dropout Jared Loughner attempted to assasinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords at a public speaking event in Tuscon, Arizona.  The shooting spree resulted in six deaths and numerous injuries.  Several people who went to school with Loughner said he was pretty much a weirdo and an outcast.  One classmate emailed her friends that she feared that he would someday shoot everyone in class, and another classmate said that she would often sit near the exit of her class for that very same fear.  School officials eventually suspended Loughner from school because they felt that he posed a danger to the students and faculty.  On April 16, 2007, college student Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.  Cho had a long history of depression and anxiety, in addition to a past arrest for stalking.  His abnormal behavior was a cause for fear among his teachers and classmates.  If Loughner and Cho were my dormitory suitemates in 1995, we would all think they were weird, but we would never have been scared that they would blow our heads off.

  It seems like being in college now and being in college in 1995 are generations apart, even though it is only a difference of fifteen years.  What has changed?  If this is simply a sign of the times, then it’s safe to assume that we live in a more violent era.  I don’t think that this is just the natural progression of culture.  Like Jon Stewart recently said, I don’t blame political rhetoric for Loughner’s crime just like I don’t blame Marilyn Manson for the Columbine massacre of 1999.  It’s just not true.  What is true is that the students in college right now have spent the entirety of their adolescence under the umbrella of two wars.  One war doesn’t have a clearly defined goal, and the other war was won by us yet we don’t feel like winners.  Neither of these wars seems traditional or makes complete sense to grown-ups, but do they affect our children in any way?  If it’s true that our government is representative of the people, then we must also accept that a senseless and violent government will breed a senseless and violent society.

  This is not to say that there has never been gun violence in school.  When I was in high school, there was always the risk of being shot by a gangster, but you were never really scared of these guys.  They would only shoot you if you said hi to their girlfriend or if you looked at them in a funny way.  Other than that, they were cool and would get you beer.  No one was scared of Peter, but today everyone is scared of someone.  Everyone is filled with rage, like rats in cages.

  • 5:51 pm
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