The best part of being alive so far has been the capacity that I have had, as an intelligent person, to make fun of everyone. My nickname is Evil, after all. I have to confess to a few instances of mischief-making and mocking. However, I try to be conscious of the ill effects of this, especially of those jokes concerning my friends.
I became conscious of this while seeing a play about a girl who was an amateur stand-up comic. She grew up using her sense of humor as a weapon against everyday problems and situations. The heroine was doing fine with her moral code until she saw how much her jokes were hurting her best friend, who was the subject of a lot of her ridicule. The play ended with her quitting one of her stand-up routines right in the middle of her performance in order to spare the feelings of her family and her little homie g. Kudos to the playwright for making a character with whom many people can probably identify, including me.
I am a hypocrite, and I know this-I have hurt people thoughtlessly (hard to believe, isn't it). While hopefully my own actions teach me how I should better act, similar situations apparently do not cause so much ethical anguish within a lot of people. We've all seen someone who did something completely asinine and thought, "Wow, what a jerk, I hope they go to hell." We've all done things that may be interpreted by the unkind as asinine acts but were, well, merely products of dormant stupidity finding an outlet. We've also done rude or hurtful things to one another, and either not realized that we've been cruel or not cared about the consequences. Often we don't think about these things until we're the subjects of this indifference.
Rhodes is a lovely example of a microcosm of human incivility. Chivalry is still struggling for life around the campus, I'll admit; but have you noticed the subsequent effect upon an unfortunately large chunk of recipients of chivalry (traditionally females)? They've become that much ruder. Witness two girls meeting at a door and trying to push through at the same time. How amusing it can be when they give one another dirty looks in passing.
Or how about all the plastic-cup-toting students lounging about in the road snaking between Clough and Townsend & Co., semi-oblivious to the 2-ton machines trying desperately not to hit them in the quest for parking? Some drivers try harder to be careful than others: a friend of mine complained a few weeks ago of being a few feet shy of appearing on a Campus Safety report as a machine-struck pedestrian. In some respects, we treat our lives and the existence of other people as a bother. People are objects to avoid, for one reason or another; this is a strange attitude, considering that many people want to be regarded as human beings, and not as objects. There appears to be a dichotomy between the way people expect to be treated and the dehumanizing way they actually treat one another.
While I'm almost sure that concern for human existence exists somewhere on campus, it doesn't appear to be entrenched in the attitude of the student body as a whole. Sure, some girls love their little sises, but how well do many Rhodes students know one another?
I know I'm a social recluse, but I know I'm not alone when I say that I find myself being completely clueless when friends talk about people in my own graduating class; and don't even ask me whether I know more than ten underclassmen. I don't know which to find more disturbing, though-my ignorance or the fact that when I do hear (or talk) about people, it's usually just gossip.
Some people try to hold onto friendships, but a lot more intersections than friendships are made in these four short years. This could be due to the intense nature of college life; our perceptions of friendship are complicated during this time in ways often completely different from the type of social interaction we enjoyed in grade school. Back then, most of us were friends with people who had known us for a long time and who we felt had some kind of interest in our well-being. In college, we are forced to make new acquaintances, pick a life path, deal with being truly adult, and survive in perhaps the realest world many of us have known.
In this light it may be understandable that people have become self-protective. However, to become so callous as to ignore the capacity to suffer pain in other people is unforgivable. We should be able to do better than this, kids.
There is something to be said for human dignity. We don't realize that we shape people's college careers, for ill or for good, in our everyday interactions with them; when someone is dehumanized, it tends to have an ill effect on him or her. I'm not trying to be pedantic; I'm merely suggesting that we attempt to treat other humans as if they were actually humans too. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle," says Plato; you're not the only one with an upcoming test, or a sick grandma, or problems with your boyfriend. Remember that everyone has a bad day every so often, but don't think that just because you're having a bad day (or even a bad life) that the world owes you a license to be inconsiderate.
Try to be nice. Or I may use my evil powers in order to regulate.