I was going to write a long post about RUSA and I still want to. There are a few things that have gotten in the way of my posting. I graduated college almost two weeks ago, and it’s amazing to wonder how quickly that can send you into a tail spin. Really fucking quickly.
See, for someone who doesn’t privilege a position political groups above the political as a universal, I would argue that it’s harder to buffer the stress and wear on the individual who is invested in politics. I spent most of my time in college, when I was doing meaningful writing, talking about the flaws of the institution in general and particular. I even wrote a series of blog entries talking about how I should drop out of college in order to pursue genuine education outside. That, to me, was the first step in recognizing my aversion to institutions. But, this past semester has shown me that many of the notions that I (and I would guess most of us) have about intelligence, political legitimacy, and social capability has a hell of a lot to hand to our institutional shaping. This is not a complete shaping, but it affects us more than we know, and when I consider political engagement, I wonder how the university can be overcome.
For example. What am I going to do now with all of my high falutin politics? That’s a common enough question (well not so common). But consider the groups who are active on campus–sure, it might not be about the individuals who run the organization, but there is a fundamental aging out process that happens in college, ie we all graduate, and there’s practically no social outlet for people to talk about the state of their labor conditions once they leave university. It all appears as a dream. There are certain interest groups, for sure, and reading groups, etc. But what do the really smart ones do? What do the really comitted ones do? Don’t they usually go to graduate school?
And so, I’m just sitting here, and I want to get rid of all those ideas and all that shit. If I’m going to follow any of what I said in college, from within the gentle culture cloister, I’ve got to do it in the world place, too. I’ve got to face that 21st century diaspora.
