Op-Ed: True life: I am a tolerant Midd student

Allow me to invite you to dine with me in Proctor dining hall (where all the cool kids eat) and I will introduce you to my Benetton friends. This is my Indian friend, Prageet, but he’s actually from Texas. Can you believe that he had never eaten curry until I took him out to A Taste of India for his birthday last year? And here is my Jewish friend, David. I greet him with a big Shalom every morning. Finally, this is Nadine. She likes sports, but I still love her. So look at all of my diverse and interesting friends. Did I win college yet?

So clearly, that little parable was just to get your attention. Anthony Adragna’s article last week raised many big questions for me that I would like to share with the student body. While I admire the spirit behind Adragna’s call for more tolerance at Middlebury, closed-mindedness and a fear to depart from old habits seems to be a symptom of the greater issue at hand. This is the fact that we are not yet fully-realized people, living together in this very surreal oasis for self-discovery and achievement. Let us step back and look at the bigger picture of our diverse collegiate experience.

The fact of the matter is identity cannot be solved by any old label. While labels do need to exist, they are only a small part of who we are and the other 7/8ths of the metaphorical iceberg of human existence is a lot more complex than that.

Figuring that out is what makes college, and life, so much fun. Life would be boring if we all got along and loved each other. Often I feel that an open willingness to discuss this tension on campus is lacking and this is what frustrates me. I do not want more answers, I want more questions. I have seen all the ABC after-school specials and I am ready to engage in a community that wants to project itself beyond another trite, cookie-cutter mold.

We all know that there are a lot of pressures to bear as Middlebury students, but are all of these pressures warranted? How much of these requirements to fit into the Middlebury mold are actually self-imposed, and why would we do that to ourselves?

This past week, we were lucky enough to have Ariel Levy, a new role model of mine, come speak about the book Female Chauvinist Pigs in which she describes an economically-driven movement of raunch culture in America. She told of an encounter she had with a woman on Girls Gone Wild. Just as the woman had finished making out with another girl, Levy asked her why she did it, and she responded that it was a reflex, not a spark of passion or inspiration, just something automatic. That got me thinking about what is automatic here that perhaps should be more passionate. Are there aspects of this school that merely imitate inspiration rather than embody it?

While Middlebury, and any college, is full of great resources and good, kitschy fun, it is still a business and we are still part of a contract. We have to make the school look good so it will run. We all gave off an image of something to get in here, and we have to keep up that image to make the school look good, but I don’t want my daily existence to function on merely that level.

While you can pick your means of education from a catalogue, you cannot really pick your relationships that way. I might give off a certain image, but I myself am much more than that image and so are my friends. Our relationships are very real. They are real people and we share common values and good humor, but at the same time, we question and challenge each other in new and interesting ways everyday. Real inspiration is what we should strive for. That is what helps us truly grow and diversity comes along with that. There is a whole lot more to me than what I wrote down on my college application. I do not necessarily know what that all is, but I am comfortable with that, and I hope the rest of campus can join me in being comfortable with not having to know entirely who we are right now.