Finally I Can Graduate

Here's the link to this article on the website, but the editors mangled it. The original version is posted below: http://media.www.dailycampus.com/media/storage/paper340/news/2007/10/30/Commentary/Finally.I.Can.Graduate.In.Peace-3065167.shtml

This column is self-serving and essentially egotistical. I’m not writing about an important political issue or a valid campus concern. I’m writing because I got to rush the field Saturday at the football game and now my college experience is complete. Until now, the approaching completion of my 120 credits hung like a court date circled on the calendar. I felt I had not “done it all.” Now I am content, and can move onto whatever comes next.

During my college search, I narrowed my options down to UVM and UConn. My aversion towards attending my state school (I’m from the New Haven area) mirrored the reasoning used by anyone who had attended a marginally big high school: because ‘everybody’ goes there and I wanted something different- that and I didn’t like the notion of my parents popping in weekly if I was so close to home. It’s also the reason I didn’t go to Yale. The reality? Your parents are fired up to get rid of you. (The Opinion Staff has started to phase out the usage of the word ‘you’ because it insinuates what the reader is thinking and can thus offend people who don’t hold that viewpoint. I’m not asserting that all your parent’s hate you.) Their mock anguish exists only to saddle you with the obligation to buy them nice things when you become successful. (I just said ‘you’ were going to be successful, ‘you’ can’t be pissed about that.)

I went on my college visit to UVM with the latent intention of making it my final choice. Anything I found attractive about the school, I would have overrated. Any deficiencies, I would have depreciated. “Oh it’s overrun by smelly hippies?” “I heard they were easy-going people.” We arrived at the school, gave the town a cursory glance and started in search of the football stadium; a staple of every assessment. Upon being notified by a confused undergraduate that the football stadium we were trying to find didn’t exist, my college decision was made. It’s one of those deal-breakers that wasn’t dismissible, like a girl telling you she’s really into Saw III or a guy canceling a first date an hour before he’s supposed to cook for a girl because he “just doesn’t feel like it.”

So Storrs it was and it proved to be a good time to jump on the Huskies’ bandwagon. The team moved up to Division I in 2000 and one of the swiftest rises to prominence in recent memory. They attracted the interest of a major conference by 2002, had joined that conference by 2004 and were given a bowl invitation in their first year of eligibility, an impressively fast growth spurt on anyone’s charts. Still, while they hovered on the edge of college football’s upper echelon, they still hadn’t made that prized kill; they weren’t yet “Made Men.” As Hunter S. Thompson once professed “The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

The Huskies went over that edge when they toppled the No. 10 ranked team in the nation. I went over that edge when I vaulted ten feet over a three-hundred pound, steroid addled security guard who had a scared freshman in a full nelson. The energy in the stands was palpable. Strangers were high-fiving and cracking jokes and making sure their neighbor would give them a boost onto the goal posts. A heavy rain has a harmonious effect on a group and probably also accounts for part of the reason the squad pulled off these last two wins. In sports it’s said that weather is the great equalizer and it definitely did its part in minimizing the handicap caused by the team’s usually inferior speed. But the effect of the crowd also can’t be dismissed. These past two weeks were a statement. The Huskies, like true alpha-dogs, marked their territory. The Rent is officially a war zone, an unstable environment for opposing forces. (They also have a hunting store right on the property, which is convenient for those who wanted to go to a football game and then buy a fishing rod or thought tailgating with a rifle raised the level of excitement.)

The game ended in the fashion of all memorable upsets, with a conclusion that had fans delirious with anticipation and with a nervous, “what’s going to happen next?” feeling )similar to how Britney Spears’ supporters feel.) The crowd descended onto the field with a mob mentality. This was my moment. I started towards the front, shoving kids out of the way like a self-indulgent passenger of the Titanic trying to get to a life boat. The sight of the security guard opening a can of whoop-ass only reminded me to, in the words of Van Halen, “hit the ground running.”

Let’s face it: aside from capsizing the goal posts, the actual rushing of the field activity is just a glorified exercise in insanity. After about age six or seven it stops being socially acceptable to jump around screaming in joy. There’s only so many times you can slam a player on their shoulder pads or high five a 65 year-old before you realize you’re acting like you just traded a fourth round draft pick for Randy Moss.

But the sense of achievement doesn’t derive from the actual act but rather the significance of the occasion. The football team has finally stepped onto the national stage. They earned their first -ever ranking in the respected polls. (At least all that lobster those players are being fed at their fancy new facility now seems justified for the time being.) And I got to rush the field. Now I’m okay with wrapping up my stay on this farmland, although that’s probably only for the time being, as well- at least until I realize I’m going to need a job that pays more than ten dollars an article.

About the Influence

In a recent anti-marijuana television commercial they show a teenaged girl grabbing some munchies out of the fridge as a friend calls out her name. She turns around with a very confused look on her face. Now the viewer is thinking, “Man, this young girl must be hopelessly stoned. She does have a problem. She doesn’t even recognize her own friends.” Then the camera pans to the friend; the issue is that the friend is actually her dog. “Lindsay, I wish you wouldn’t smoke weed. You’re not the same when you smoke.”

The first time I saw this ad I wasn’t even sure what the “friend” said because I was too busy meditating on that fact that the dog was speaking to her. What is the message here? Smoke weed and you can talk to animals? I guess it is touching that “man’s best friend” is pleading with her for a change but when doesn’t a dog find us humans a bit weird. We’re always going places to do work and eating with utensils and we refuse to catch Frisbees in our mouth. I also like that the dog uses the term “weed,” it shows that he is hip to the jive of today but honestly, how many ten year olds innocently approached their parents and asked how they could start smoking weed so they could talk to their pets? The problem here is that while trying to educate our young ones about the perils they will face in the real world, such as drugs, its done in an ineffective way.

The chief problem with anti-drug advertisements is that they depend too much on scare tactics to get their message across. They hammer home the alleged end result of using these substances without supplying the logic to reach the conclusions. “Smoke pot and you’ll be lazy.” “Smoke pot and you’ll be anti-social.” But if a kid sees this message, and still decides to experiment, and does not find these warnings to be applicable, as sometimes is the case, then he or she may disregard the underlying message of the ad, which is, in fact, true.

We live in a celebrity obsessed culture where Dr. Dre and Snoop smoke bongs in their videos and other personalities across the board openly admit to using the substances and it gives it appeal. If parents (who are naturally not cool- it’s a proven fact) instruct to just say no to drugs but then celebrities who get all the glamour are shown using the substances, who do you think is going to win out? “Say no because my parents say so,” or “Smoke weed, have (what appears to be) fun and party with scantily clad women.”

Now I’m not blaming the media or celebrities, they are both natural parts of society, it’s just that in all anti-drug attempts I’ve come across, they always seem to miss the point a little bit and leave me more confused than anything. They have the one ad where a friend is giving a testimonial about pot’s influence on her former friend. On the verge of tears and in an obvious fit of misery she explains, “Jody started smoking pot and…she started spending so much time by herself. She started staying home all the time and… wouldn’t hang out with us anymore.” This is very touching and I’m sure some can relate to parts of it but come on, really? Nobody gets into smoking pot by lighting up by themselves at their parents house. Maybe they were just bad friends. Maybe she never wanted to hang out with them in the first place and it took a few tokes for her to just say, in softer terms, screw it. That’s what authority figures say pot does. It just makes you start saying screw it to showers and haircuts and parents and condoms. Maybe she now had new friends who weren’t afraid to smoke a little cheeba with her once in a while and they weren’t constantly nagging her in a half-crying voice to come hang out.

That is why the anti-drug campaigns are always a little bit off; “Just say no” doesn’t work but the hard part about advocating a different course of action is that by doing so you are, to a certain extent, advocating the use of substances. This issue pertains to alcohol education too. CNN.com recently ran an article about Stanton Peele, the author of “Addiction-Proof Your Child.” His perspective is that “any program that tells kids flatly not to drink creates temptation.” It is a natural phenomenon that people want what they can’t have.

The Libertarian Party takes the issue even further. They are pushing for the end to all drug prohibition. They say that it does more harm than good and is the cause of a lot of unneeded violence. Just like all other pro-drug voices they use the example of alcohol prohibition and how there was a significantly elevated crime rate during that time. They say another facet of the problem is that since drugs are illegal the cost is inflated and this causes users to have to commit crimes in order to support their habits. This not only creates danger for citizens but means that a significant amount of police resources are devoted to alleviating the problem. While they represent an extreme and radical end of the spectrum, they do give food for thought.

I really don’t know what the overall solution is but what’s currently being done is not working. Look around you, drinking and smoking is everywhere and nothing that has been done to attempt to curb the use of these vices has worked with much effectiveness. All these ads talk about being, “above the influence” but I feel like that implies a general avoidance of the subject. Let’s talk about the influence and discuss the influence and reach a compromise regarding the influence that doesn’t involve taking advice from animals.