Good Morning: Outdated campus attitude fails to embrace direction of its own generation
Last Sunday marked the annual Video Music Awards. And all spectacle and controversy aside, it actually provoked some serious thought. In the last two years, the attention of the night was not on the cool or the glamorous celebrities, but the bizarre. The outlandish comic, Russell Brand was, to great success, the host of both years’ evenings. In both ceremonies, it was the most eccentric artist that stole the show: last year oddball rapper Lil Wayne, this year Lady Gaga. It is becoming quite clear that this type of celebrity most purely represents this newest of generations. I am not arguing for or against either icon’s personal or artistic merit, but rather that we have become the generation of the eccentrics. It is becoming more of a distinction to be unique not a shame. It is the eccentricities that make a person more noticeable, more admirable and more marketable. I always thought of it as a curse and a shame to have had to skip the second semester of my freshman year. Maybe though, it is because of that time off, because of that break in my college timeline, that I can step back and see what happens to people here. People who came to Franklin College as individuals, young men wearing metal T-shirts or young women not afraid to wear baggy clothes, were already dressing to fit the majority of students here when I returned a year later. I am perfectly aware that people change in college. I know that I have. Growing up is not squeezing yourself into the same cookie-cutter shape as those around you. It is devolution. Devolving into the middle-school mindset where those who stand out are bullied. It is growing dim. It is losing the part of yourself that separates you from the others. In the New Yorks, the LAs and the Londons, in the places that move and shape the world, it is the black sheep who are rising through the ranks. It is the followers who are smirked at when they walk by, not the freaks. This campus seems to have built a bubble around itself, unable to see the real world. Instead of standing out as a beacon of tolerance and enlightenment, we stand out from the great schools and cities of the world as a place of conformity and stagnation. This is my home. As such, I want to be proud of it as a home of the open-minded and the open-eyed. I suppose I’m just asking that we all take a look around. Godspeed and Good Morning.
