It has long since been the time when you last left the house and decided to venture into an adventure that is one heck of a pilgrimage but also a fascinating time. Frenzied and Crazed is the collegiate atmosphere, but remember that people have graduated from these institutions before, and some of them were just like you. If we ponder these deep thoughts, we can get really huge answers to life that will make our understanding of human behavior and interaction clearer.
Remember that the world we live in is dominated by human creations, and among those creations are Freedom & Power, Terrible Breakfast Food, Relationships (that actually matter), and the Comfort Zone (keep in mind we are examining in adherence to a United States experience). When you enter college, you are leased an immense amount of freedom through your State Constitution (in most jurisdictions) where you can sue, be sued (YAY!), buy a car, establish credit, go to the strip club, establish more privacy, cook a bagel, but most importantly become an independent in the American Legal System. You can choose to be like a Sinnerman crying “Power! To the Lord!”, or make something of yourself and continue on your career path: those are the two choices that society imprinted on us.
There is, however, an option C to this and it consists of both a mixture of the two and at the same time neither. Immediately when you reach the age of majority in your jurisdiction, so many items happen at the same time you could consider your life now newly polarized like a fresh magnet you have on the kitchen fridge. Your relationship with your parents change and is seen in a different light. You now have to worry about being accused of statutory rape if you are dating someone under that age of majority, and you have to go and eat terrible breakfast food at your local university kitchen (personally as long as there is fruit, I am okay). Now you have a brand-new stigma of being the “reckless broke promiscuous college student” that your elders always knew you would be. Solely communicating with an older person of much higher status is like playing Russian Roulette with your sanity, and one wrong word means pressing the trigger to blow all of your chances at actually furthering your life. Gone. Nihil.
What makes it so that the entire population of a faction is stigmatized to a certain point? It socially unjust and requires attention and a call-to-action for the truth behind such philosophies. The formal name is “Stereotyping”, but really its Mass-Profiling. It comes from a psychological background where us humans in a primal state would study the behavior or other creatures and immediately form a mental pre-cognition of their threat to our survival. Somehow through some freaky neo-metro pseudo logic crap, we are now known as “that collegiate”. No longer are the days of being burnt as “those reckless youth” oh NO! More effortless than Stanley Hudson on “The Office”, we have unconsciously embraced this idea that we are in our own comfort zone away from all of the pressures of society.
THE COMFORT ZONE IS ARISTOCRATICAL *expletive*.
We do not like to be profiled as lesser beings of society. We do not enjoy the company of more superior-seeming adults that clearly lack the education we have but are credited with it more because “it’s just the way the world works”. We are not to blame for pluralistic gridlock because we are all very different. We are not committing suicide for attention. We will not yield the floor to someone more experienced because the status quo does not allow for the new generation to learn tricks of the trade. We do not hate adults or the homeless. We can’t find a job the same way baby-boomers did before us. We are here, and in the moment paying for the atonement of the sins of man. We will clean up after your mess. We are the ones funding your Social Security pensions. We will establish new communities and corporations far larger and more intuitive than humanly possible. We are not lying around waiting for our parents to pick up our pieces and send them off to the Representatives and Senators of an older generation. We are building the bridge of generation connection while it is coincidentally being torn down by social bigots afraid of change. We are the future, and we are making a difference right now. Why? Because we want to be able to tell our children that we created and survived through a new generation of the world. We want to be able to fund our leisure & necessity without having to become dependent on old inefficient tactics. We want to eliminate social politics and become a more unified body together.
Why? Because we will NOT be labeled “That” College Student.
