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The result is an artificial bourgeoisie that is incapable of accumulating capital and merely squanders its revenue—
Guy Debord.
Today is never really today. I can’t tell if there ever existed a day that was caught up with itself; I’m not entirely sure that idea matters for someone like me. I was born after the Great Rift in history. It doesn’t make much a difference if you want to believe in a religion or if you want to believe in a hundred thousand faces in the crowd, splintering off into the cold night with jealously. Either one you choose, you’re always choosing a religion. Sometimes I go to sleep at night and think about the fact that I am going to sleep. But most times I can’t, because I’m not really alive. I just inhabit.
Human Nature 101
Countless stories: shooting here, bombing there, corruption everywhere. Human nature is, therefore, evil?
It becomes hard to determine whether these assumptions are based on actuality or simply generalizations about certain kinds of “crazy” people. After all, if we begin with the mentality that we are individuals who live separately of each other it’s easier to conclude that people are corrupt, or evil. This is because it can always be reduced to “them” and not “me”. So how do we draw these conclusions?
We have a tendency to quickly make generalizations about how people inherently are based on their living conditions and behavior within their environment. For example, we have assumptions that the poor part of town has more crime and is more dangerous, so naturally we avoid it. The humanist may even feel an inner sadness and wish that things could be different for the family living in the run-down house, or the woman sitting alone in the park who hasn’t showered in who-knows-how-long. But what can the humanist do other than extend sympathy and pity, and occasionally his meager charity? He exists within the confines of his individuality, to the extent that he may not see his role in the homeless woman’s life, because he acts with good intention-not with utter societal urgency. Without any conscious effort, we separate ourselves and assume that we are inherently different from the drunk, homeless guy sitting on the corner of Starbucks. Yes, we may recognize our privilege, whatever it may be, but that is probably the extent. After all, each one of us is an individual in a greater struggle for survival and ultimately happiness, however fleeting it may be.
As individuals make distinctions among themselves based on lived experiences, they may lose the capacity to relate his or her experience to that of someone else because the experiences and existence do not appear to be even remotely comparable. On the surface this may appear to be true, allowing people, myself included, to hear the news story about the shooting in the federal building and feel bad, but also disconnected from the actuality of the events. It seems as if there is nothing else that can be done but feel bad- there’s no pending need to understand the circumstance or how it’s all related to every day political and social decisions. By being rooted in the comfortable notions of tradition it’s easy to say things are the way that they are, and no matter what you do they will remain this way. There will always be poor people. There will always be rich people. There will always be crazies. There will always be radicals. There will always be purely evil people.
The question that rarely gets asked is, “what role do we play in the conditions of others that we deem to be different from ourselves?”. We all live in the same society, whether we consider it to be the United States, or New Jersey, or New Brunswick, so how is it that we do not consider this when staring at the drunk on the corner?
Consider how are our laws structured? “Equal opportunity for all,” no? Obviously, the delinquent on the street is there because sometime in his past, he fucked it up, right? It’s his human nature, his irresponsibility, his inner violence that places him among the scum of society-or at least his lack of emphasis on education and utter refusal to resist his own “greedy” temptations. (At least it’s a common perception.) It has nothing to do with the environment of crime in which he was raised, the continued oppression he faces at the hands of his fellow citizens and popularly supported institutions. Or does it? While his circumstance may be different, there is an inevitable connection merely because we are governed under the same law and societal set of standards that privilege some and not others. Can this mean that individual actions and daily decisions in my personal, material, and political life have any impact on the leaf blower working down the block? What if we are not on two different planets, and only have that perception through our fragmented ideas of reality and unity? Maybe it’s the same micro civilization that we come to love in which are all “free”-at least legally and ideologically.
Here comes the more important “what if?”. What if under the same government, it were me who was stranded on the street without security? What if it were me that resorted to gang violence in order to have a chance at survival? What if I were the one without a home because I lost my job to outsourcing? What if it were me who resorted to alcohol to avoid feeling humanly despair?
If this were me, would I still feel disconnected from the privileged person walking past me? Or would I feel more connected to that person? Oppressed even? Maybe then I would understand that we are all united under the same societal structures. Maybe then I would urge people to refuse the common conceptions of evil human nature, which are the causes of particular circumstance.
To what extent can we continue to perceive human nature as inherently evil without falling back onto traditional and bigoted assumptions of “the way things are”, when we are all bound to each other through social and political interactions? We cannot, because perhaps civilization in the present cannot sustain itself without envisioning life in which all individuals are free from fragmented social and political relations.
And now I ask, what makes you feel human? Is it your freedom? Is it your happiness? What about your pain?
the unavoidable situation:
do not become a statistic!
Becoming a statistic: the ultimate ruin! What does it mean when advertising companies or “awareness” groups—maybe even common knowledge—warn us against becoming a stat? It implies that the individual runs into certain situations that wipe my personal history, tastes, relationships under the rug: to be treated the same way as everyone else in this scenario—and the treatment is rarely good. When am I myself and when am I recognized as “myself”?
Conversely, when do I have to inhabit a public, uniform role—consumer, voter, loan-seeker?—roles that have nothing to do with personal identity that is so encouraged to be unique, artistic, ambitious etc. What we quickly learn is that we are not treated the same in these statistic-filling roles, nor are our private lives nearly as important as the nameless ones we are forced to fill, as we have been led to believe; we are not equal to each other in the ways our grammar-school teachers insisted. What we find too is that we are not merely individuals floating near and around each other. Something isn’t matching up, and at the dawning of a new decade that we find our selves and the statistic-like roles we fill sliding further away from each other. And it’s funny that we should re-discover this social chasm between our real lives (our private lives, dreams) and the seemingly impossible public lives we are expected to lead in order to secure the former. The task of reconciling these two ideas: cause and effect, appears impossible, broken, even foolish to dream of.
In simple terms: we all know that we need (at least) a college degree in order to survive in the social situation we were born in. But in the ever-increasing eyes of the banks and the state, a university degree is seen as a luxury and not a necessity.
Recognizing our inability to function—our identity seeping into us, soaking past us, leaving us: this is the despair of the individual.
Getting into a car accident, for example, would constitute another kind of event that disregards a unique self. (If you die in a car accident, the looming fear is that you are remembered not for who you were in life, but for the manner in which you died.) Equally terrifying, and more common, are the types of events that severely fuck you and your individuality on an everyday terrain: getting pulled over by the cops right after you bought weed, realizing that your student loan did not go through and that you will not be attending school this semester, rounding out your fifth year post-grad with seventy thousand dollars of loans breathing down your neck, without a job.
Becoming a statistic, or fear of becoming one, pinpoints a series of similar situations that are increasingly unavoidable since our lives are ever more entwined with the monstrous forces of the economy, the state government, the university. And the stronger these forces become (the merging of federal government with business interests), the more challenging it becomes to continue our lives as scattered individuals.
The unavoidable situation, whether it is procured by chance of fate (Blue Candidate wins instead of Red, or vice versa), or by voluntary necessity (taking out student loans to pay for college) are really several versions of the same incident: a moment in which the otherwise insulated life of the American student comes into direct contact with the real powers that be.
This is not to say that power encountered is always the same face, at least on the surface, but the completely impersonal identity you are forced to assume and realize that you assume are felt in the same way. We all know the feeling in some capacity, if only I could explain my background, my story, my dire economic straits! You would do the same thing in my position; I could make you empathize, officer, loan-officer…
Alas, situations in which the richly diverse and unique individual might tell his story and finally convince the chin-haired financial aid employees to let him please stay registered in his spring classes don’t usually happen. It’s a difficult thing for us individualist-based thinkers to understand, but most of the time, no one really gives a damn about how much we each deserve to attend Rutgers University. No one really cares about our potential (that is, before we’ve paid tuition). At least, it’s convenient enough to think so.
It’s a lucky thing that the boundaries between the administration and the faculty are so clearly marked out for the student; else we should start to see the inconsistencies in our education—are we really here because we are smart? Because we deserve to be here?
And so, we try your darnedest to get those term bills in on time, submit all the proper paper work for an unpaid internship.
In paying taxes (or at least proving that we’ve got nothing to give!), taking out loans and getting drunk and high clandestinely, what we as individuals are really doing is highlighting our inability to function autonomously. And I know what some might be thinking: well it’s the law, stupid! We can’t all run around and do what we want; the whole thing would just fall to shit! That is, we can’t go around breaking the law in ways that haven’t been tacitly obliterated.
But of course, this kind of obedience implicitly degrades the very primacy of our decision-making ability! This is the essence of why we continue to hide from the situations that prove to us again and again that we really are under the same kinds of pressures, laws, and due-dates as everyone else, and it doesn’t matter whether or not we know better.
Notice too, that in all of these situations, the alternative (our avoidance) is based on the advance-purchase protection against becoming a statistic: by following the law (at least to the extent that we will most likely not be noticed breaking the law), we ensure that we are still able to function without the overt presence of a power-structure in our lives.
My life has been purchased for one more semester…
Or even worse, we really do leave our lives to fate: presidential elections, wars, famines. We allow ourselves to avoid responsibility by sticking to the two and a half categories made available to us in the American government system instead of rallying against it and looking outside the linear spectrum of left to right, blue to red.
What we really want when we say we want to live as unique and uninterrupted beings is that we want to live as everyone else (as students, as debtors, as workers) without being reminded that we are interchangeable in the eyes of the law or the bank or each other. We want to remain ignorant for just a moment longer that we are and have always been statistics.
Maybe we should stop believing that it’s an honor and a privilege to receive a public university education, maybe we should stop believing that we can out-smart an entire finance empire built on the interest of our student loans so generously applied to our accounts. Maybe we should acknowledge what we already know to be true: a university degree is not an asset but a prerequisite for employment, and we shouldn’t have to pay outrageous rates to work the same jobs our parents did with a high school diploma.
But in the end, is what we really want a cheaper way to have the jobs our parents had? Is it really so unreasonable to say “no, that is not the point. That is not the point of education”? If we are to believe the guest-speaker, the presidents, the professors of our institutions during their speeches at our annual graduations, the real culmination of education sounds like a critical, productive (think about that word, don’t just read it!), maybe even revolutionary body.
If the rhetoric is to be believed, it looks something like the philosophy of living; a thing that doesn’t correlate to a job or salary grid, at all.
Air Quotes
Of least importance in 2010—a party. A party, a Party; whether political or drunken, it doesn’t matter. The two ideas crashed into each other a long time ago. What is needed (what was seen) in 2010, and the decade beyond is a small and ethical remembrance. Forget the 1960’s [and our super-imposed memories from it]; an ethical remembrance of the possibility of real life is the cloudy dream for something beyond the everyday and the ordinary.
The Repetition of Fleeting Moments
Thursday, maybe Friday, night: thank goodness! The short window of “freedom” has begun; one more weekday might just kill me. It’s time to let loose, have a little fun, drink, smoke some pot, whatever, just fucking relax! So around 9:00 or 10:00 the music begins to blast as I get ready to go out and attract a good time. The steady booming beat of the music gets me pumped, and the music flows through me like a rush of energy. It can’t help but boost my confidence-but the constant text messages from the friends I am about to meet to some extent stresses me out, as I scramble to be on time. I cannot wait to get out of my room and let the fun begin; maybe I feel particularly alive tonight!
The crowds on College Ave suggest everyone else has the same plan, because it is built into college culture to do so. The beautifully and painstakingly manicured ladies, and the well-dressed and cologned men make me think, “It’s great to be young and free”. It’s only when you are young that you get to indulge, have fun, and cling to the fleeting moments of pure enjoyment and happiness, every Friday, every Saturday, every weekend.
I finally arrive to where my friends and I are headed, and immediately gravitate towards the central keg- or the special guest- to take the edge off and attempt to socialize. The new hit song comes on, possibly the same one I played getting ready and it feels great to be in sync with the party and everyone else in the room having fun. The deep bass just flows through my entire being again and echoes through my head and chest. I lose myself in it, a smile passes over my face, and I forget my worries for a brief instant. Maybe I’m already drunk.
I lean into my friend to say something, yelling into his ear, but he still cannot hear me. Whatever, it’s a party, I’m not going to be the fucking downer trying to have a conversation about who-knows-what! The beat continues to penetrate the air, the floor, and I feel relaxed. Buzzed. Caught up in the rhythm. The girl across the room has had way too much to drink and cannot stop talking and telling secrets. Normally I would be embarrassed for her, but it’s a party. She’s making a spectacle of herself. “I’m glad I’m not her”. But how different am I, maybe I haven’t had enough to drink to start openly expressing my hidden fears and desires of being alone- of being misunderstood.
I recognize that they linger deep below my skin, I feel them floating upwards.
At the end of the night, I’m pretty drunk with my beloved friends and have had an amazing night, one to remember, amongst all the rest… but what was so special about it? (Or can I even remember?)
Sometimes parties aren’t my style. I would rather just chill with some friends, grab dinner, do whatever. At least I can hang out and hear the person I am talking to. Sometimes the discussions are amazing, and they make me think about my surroundings or even simply laugh at something ridiculous- I just don’t want to feel alone. But what do I really know about the person next to me? I know who he or she is, I know that person’s name and major-maybe-probably something about what his or her life is like since we’ve met, but do I really feel a sense of loyalty? Am I just pretending to be cool, “chilling,” playing along? How am I not myself? More often than not I feel as though I am a fixture in one of the worst movies that lacks any character depth. I am one of those characters that you take for granted, but I can’t escape the generic plot. I am my own background noise. I don’t feel free.
I study something that maybe I care about, because it’s expected or because I genuinely love learning. Either way I’m trapped, there are always those lonely nights when I sulk around and wonder why I am not happy. It’s the same during the day. On the bus, I don’t want to deal with people, so I hook up to my iPod and spend time with the music that makes me feel alive, while avoiding the physically present human beings around me. But they’re probably floating off as well. What prohibits me from really interacting with unknown others while sober?
Then the weekend “finally” comes around again: I behave the same way every week. I can’t help but wonder if it actually does not allow me to connect to my friends, my classmates, my imagination and my passions. It’s too uncomfortable to question why I seek out the same kind of fleeting moments that suffocate me in monotonous daytime routines. The relief is fading, I look up on Saturday night, and I realize that tonight it may be just me with the stars-even as the party music keeps blasting in the background-even as the people push through the crowd to get to the keg. Where has my freedom gone?
Thursday, maybe Friday, night: thank goodness! One more weekday might just kill you too?
I Saw You Rutgers
Chasing an instant. Caught up in the busy-ness. Missing the connections. Branching out. Any way possible. Validating a moment. “I saw you cutie.” “Thank you for your help.” “I just wanted to know that you are special.” Because of circumstance. Lack of confidence. Fear of rejection. Intangible beauty: mysterious presence. Physical beauty: that quirky smile. Through the computer screen.
Listening to the silent cries for human connections, scrolling though little hopeful quips. Comparing “I Saw You Rutgers” to Facebook updates, Twitter, PostSecret, Fuck My Life, Gives Me Hope, seeing an ongoing phenomenon of individuals not wanting to be alone, wanting to be understood, hoping to be surprised. Spending the afternoon scrolling though the various entries, longing to be the lucky one. Wondering, sensing discontent, sometimes predicting unity-other times even worst fragmentation.
Too common to describe individual experience; more like collective soul searching.
For our friends in California
Schwarzenegger Calls Late-Night Attack on UC Chancellor’s Home “TERRORISM”
“California will not tolerate any type of terrorism against any leaders including educators. The attack on Chancellor Birgeneau’s home is a criminal act and those who participated will be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law. Debate is the foundation of democracy and I encourage protestors to find peaceful and productive ways to express their opinions.”
-The Terminator
What right do students have to occupy as space that is already theirs? If the common areas of the university are so occupied by the public university students and by the governments that control them, why is there such disruption in Wheeler auditoriums across the country, around the world? The most obvious hypothesis is that each group has a dramatically different perception of what public education means to the point that they cannot even touch each other. It’s true, terrorism can’t be negotiated with; maybe that’s why students have stopped petitioning, have stopped waiting patiently for employment, for financial aid.
Budget cuts and tuition hikes mean nothing to leaders when students absorb the shock, twofold. First, they must support the infrastructure of the facility, its bureaucracy at personally financed rates that bind lives to the future for material return. Second, the student body must support itself, in spite of everything, against the dwindling public spaces available to them. But their struggles will not be tolerated. Once students publicly announce that they, like their state budgets, can no longer bear extreme financial and social weights, they are terrorists while the budget and its government are merely in an emergency crisis.
The government pretends that it acts in the best interests of the population: but the best one can really say about it is that California pretends to act in the population’s best interest insofar as that power can remain in power. These measures are “common-sense” policies, “tight-belted” policies. Students (not to mention the millions effected by welfare cuts, secondary school funding, etc.) are not only obliged to suffer under the economic and social conditions brought on by governmental measures, but they have to call them democratic and legitimate forces of power. The population, forced into extreme poverty, must recognize its own interests as terroristic.
California (big and scary Frankenstein of an incarnation that it is!) will not tolerate any type of terror against “any leaders,” (here, leaders are equated with educators). And apparently, debate is the foundation of democracy… and apparently the students in the occupation are not acting in accordance with its stipulations.
It seems that the core issue is really a dispute over terminology: who are the terrorists and who are the educators? Is democracy understood as the needs and demands of the many or the polite petitions delivered by student delegates? Democracy has long suffered blasphemies against it and its current two-party incarnation has amputated all the most vital of its extremities so that “debate” is now impossible.
Nothing that matters is present on our streets and so we must either vacate the private premises or distribute it from within the chancellor’s occupation.
If California will not tolerate any type of terrorism against any leaders, including educators… what’s the problem in California, in Vienna? What AS means, in his terroristic statement, is that mainstream education should be supported and its leaders should be protected. His statement completely neutralizes any accusations against the student leaders; Schwarzengger’s manipulation of the two percent of the population with trigger words like “terrorism” only caricaturize him as an ever-less believable “educator.”
Democracy touches less and less of the possibility for student life—and how dare we fight against this? Yes, we should circulate some petitions against the anesthetization of university libraries and maybe, after one million signatures students will humbly present the piece of paper to the board of regents, and respectfully watch it burned; more realistically, respectfully watch it ignored.
Siobhan McKeown says “apart from anarchists and hippies, there is very little general will to protest amongst the younger generations.” The new student formation realizes that reforms are useless and always ignored and are treated as a part of the institution. Even if by some miracle the UC students were restored their former funding they would still be under attack. The degree to which the many are arrested by their government, by technology, by tiers of imperialism, is the degree to which the many refuse this hierarchy, directly, violently.
Lady Gaga;
It seems, then, that the ordinary vestiges of the common are nothing more than the empty spaces that fill our non-lives. That’s all just sentimental- and it’s not stationary, at all. For the everyday and the ordinary, just look to Lady Gaga.
The terror at the center of our private lives. Lady Gaga was an average girl who held an average tune, and wrote the worst kind of phony rip-off music (even for the big labels). But now! She exudes the truth of the celebrity lifestyle—an avant garde persona complete with matching shoulder-pads. We love her for her irony, we love her for her ____. She represents the horrifying power of the culture industry (as if we didn’t know this, already) to castrate the semblance of real life from humanity and impress upon it the most extreme and violent of machine-wash glitter rape. In any of her lyrics, she is singing to and about herself; a calculated morbidity. To think of Lady Gaga as anything more than a half-dimensional (wo)man—to think of Lady Gaga as a human!—is repulsive. Yet, we do believe that one day it could happen to us. And it could.
For those readers who recognize us
Not our names, because those aren’t printed, nor are they too important. But for those readers who recognize why we write consider this a note on our motives. There is little debate, even between the Democrats and Republicans that the entire world is emerging from beneath a dark and concrete shadow. This shadow, in which roared a thousand flickering disasters, is the darkest yet in our memories—and those who are emerging from the artificial womb of crack-pot suburbia enter into public life with concrete faces and bodies, the mirrors of our time.
Many readers concern themselves tangentially with our collision course with nature, the silent victims of our epoch. [Out of respect, I will not attempt to shove the world’s billions into a few phrases.] But many of us have felt tremendous fear and desire to save our planet and its populations but most of us are ultimately blocked off from deeply contemplating solutions, solutions that transcend individual action or for the betterment of an individual symptom.
Perhaps this is because we cannot simply “do something.” “Doing something” implies that we as ordinary students—no, intelligent and lucky human beings—not only have power, but know what to do with it.
And so, we retreat into our “real lives” of classes, a part time job, and struggling with unnamable fear and unhappiness.
The half-sick feeling that we get after watching four hours of HBO in a day, or consuming music for its ability to get us “in the know” and not because we are inhabiting it.
We write this little piece in an attempt to ask “what could be more real than death? Than our fellow human beings?” We write this in an attempt to ask the reader what life outside of needless items is, what thinking outside of popular 24-hour news jargon, movie quotes, and a series of economic and natural disasters that are treated as if they had been planned. We write this in an attempt to live in spite of concrete shells around us.
Of course we can’t disregard the function of car insurance, or bundling the faculty of the university with the administration and the bureaucracy that explicitly deals with the transactive forces at Rutgers—we can’t blindly and generally say “we refuse current reality” without even understanding what we stand for instead. For a moment, I thought that these run-ins might unequivocally expose something about the mis-apprehension so many of us as students in 2010 instinctively feel but are blocked off from expression, even identifying. Don’t these very processes mentioned in “statistics” provide security and underscore the best parts of our social program? Ideally, they do; but in reality, they are all contingent on the transfer of money.
Not even are they contingent of X-percent of a driver’s income towards insurance, these matters are decided on and discussed as a matter of flat fees. This factor cripples all good possibility for any “social” program and exposes it for a money making scheme. How could I be so stupid!
Of course, just as with the concept of the individual, we all know that there are limits to the ideas we have about ourselves. After all, isn’t it too simplistic to say that we really thought we were individuals? We all know that our minds are to some extent bombarded with the messages of our media, with the daily processes to which we tacitly consent. But we think that we outsmart our not being an individual by acknowledging its very fact. Taking up the situation in the refund office: anyone who has stood in line understands that there are times and places for “individual” activity and that enrollment effects many people, that one student is one of many. So, instead of defending ourselves with our experience or with our merit (“you don’t know what it was like for me to get here!”) we are forced to follow the logic of the bureaucracy and its many forms, many offices, phone extensions, filing systems, websites; all to keep a handle on the monstrous numbers student enrollment.
And that is the dead-ended notion of the rational, unique, and worthy individual.
When we use the term this way, it is obvious to see that our similarities and common ground as students at a public university in New Jersey are drastically undercut if we believe that we are all just as different from one another than, say, a billionaire living in New York City; or even if we think that “being Rutgers students” is the only topical cohesion that we have as a student body. By thinking of ourselves as “individuals” we do two things at the same time: obliterate the real economic and cultural space that we share with others while linking ourselves to members of an economically and socially elite (and I can’t help but add, drastically different) category. The words ambition and determination come to mind in order to fuel the belief that somehow more than one out of every 15,000 people will break out of his class bracket, while they might just as well be replaced with chance or luck.
Simply, this is called cynicism. Students know that they are not individuals at this moment—and naturally we are partial to the idea of identity, so we abide by the rules of non-identity in an attempt to somehow climb out of the abyss of “me and everyone else” into extreme financial success, fame, or at least some marginally renowned status in a particular field. To dream of the recognition from others to finally recognize one’s self.
This too lets the cat out of the bag: this attempt acknowledges that the ‘individual’ did not have an identity to begin with.
In this way, we can also reflect on the old ideas of patriotism: calling oneself an American in this epoch is rarely more than an attempt put oneself in opposition to a moral or economic debate that was acknowledged by the very system we claim it debases. (The “debate” over the proposed healthcare reform was stripped of its real legal content and discussed in abstract binaries—as if universal healthcare were really on the table;) claiming Americanism in opposition to a bill reduces the population into two fundamental categories: Republicans and non-Republicans, Americans and non-Americans. But even worse than this, we attempt to recuperate our nationalism that depends on the structurally imbedded friction between two (very similar but staunch) absolutist categories. Most of us believe that there are more categories than Red and Blue, Republican or Democrat, Good and Evil.
And yet we pretend that we do function in these categories, or at least try to forget about the fact that we comply with them.
Bringing this line of thought back to the more accessible notion of personal identity, we see a similar trend of pretending to fit into categories that we know are not there in order to sustain the last attempt to be different from them.
We are more than our economic condition: students, waitresses, consumers, future consumers. What kind of music we like, movies we watch, and what kind of books we ‘read’ do more than gesture to who we are, they do in fact stand in our place. We require more than this and yet all that surrounds us demands that we define ourselves by the very distinctions that lock us into fewer and fewer possibilities.
For the readers who recognize us, we recognize that there our numbers are far greater than anyone can realize—to what extent do we all feel a deep and half-forgotten desire to escape the current of “the everyday”?
There are too many of us to be denied, to be treated as a flexible part of the population who will silently accept sky-high living costs when student loans are more or less available. We can change our everyday surroundings by first acknowledging that we have long denied our non-identity.
Why We Write-
We write to you, with you, to inspire a unified effort at beginning again, an effort at redefining democracy that does not exclude us from elitist circles, but incorporates our needs in the context of the never-before-experienced current technological and cultural explosions that define our epoch.
We live in spite of this new era; one characterized by the manipulation of terms, of ideology, where ends justify the means, exclude our student voices and ideas, and limit our human capacity—necessity—to create.
We turn a language of banalities against itself, we live with endless means.
We write to you anonymously to claim our community that gets lost in fragmented moments, in lonely daily grinds, in standard political discourse…
