The Constitution establishes the right for people to have their own ideas and beliefs, free from coercion. It also allows them the right to express those beliefs, within common sense boundaries. However, it says nothing about an equality of ideas. There is no clause that says all ideas are created equal, which is fortunate, because they are not.
The pervasive spread of the Internet has led to the democratization of content. Anyone with a wireless connection can rant for a page and a half and post their work without so much as a thought as to whether its intriguing and original, or simply another repetitive piece of generic prose bouncing around Facebook. The latter probably describes most of my work so I’m not calling out other contributors from an ivory tower. But we need to realize that we are not special snowflakes, and that most of the shit we post has already been thought of before and explained more eloquently (or thoroughly discredited by people whose intellect is on a level unrecognizable we wouldn't even recognize).
The problem with Odyssey is that it encourages this mindless posting with no thought as to the quality of pieces. I joined because I wanted to be part of a literary and intellectual exchange of ideas between my peers on other campuses, that would serve to elevate a new generation of thinkers. What I see are endless lists of pointless ways to survive finals, which all of us have done before and need to stop complaining about, ridiculously trite arguments about abolishing the electoral college that we, as college students, aren’t prepared to solve thanks to our limited experience, breathtakingly poor knowledge of history, and general inability to match up against the philosophical giants of the American Revolution that created the system in the first place, and heaps upon heaps of open letters to general descriptions masquerading as people, whose content all of us have experienced, understand, and are in no need of a lesson about.
I don’t want opinion pieces. I want questioning pieces. I want pieces that end with “…and I don’t know the answer.” Most of us have been alive for under 23 years; our brains still aren’t fully formed, and quite honestly, we shouldn’t be making arguments and arguing with people with different beliefs. We should be asking questions of each other. Questions take feelings and sharpen them into beliefs. More questions fill out these beliefs, add nuance to their implications, and evolve them into theories and worldviews. Questioning is how people learn. Socrates, arguably history's greatest teacher, asked question after question after question to push people down the path of learning.
The irony that I am making an argument that we shouldn’t be making arguments is not lost on me. So, I will end with a question: I want to model Odyssey after the literary salons of the enlightenment that spawned ideas that were considered radical and revolutionary, yet today are commonplace and, if possible, understated. I don’t know how to make Odyssey into that kind of place. Do you?
