Growing up, reality is an insolent pest averse to my subdual. Evenings home landed me in a happy and fictitious place—stacked high are my bedtime books with their fantastic envisionments of alternate worlds, cast in the cocooning light of a leeringly matter-of-fact lifestyle. As an eight-year old, I pattered through the greenly-lit forests of Inkworld, dine on Cherry Cordant with Anne of Green Gables, and build stolen book fortresses in a forbidden time with Liesel—sitting there, on sunlit afternoon carpets, my childhood stretched before me as infinitesimally grandiose as the envisioned life of Peter and his Starcatchers.
As a young girl scattered betwixt school, my house, the library, I was only vaguely aware of musings of a shambling society around me—from the premonitions of the Saturday newsman, to apoplectic features in newspapers, to the harsh conduits on car radio, which unsettled and frightened me in turn. Realizations of disparate worlds hid themselves behind my self-effacing veneer of ignorance—notions of a dystopian reality had never seemed more distant.
Unfortunately, in more ways than one, college can easily feel only a few steps away from this halcyonic series of childhood events. In college, yearning for an understanding of real-world events is often not in our first-natures, given the obfuscated and often isolatory nature of our academic work. As a college student, when I am rushing from subject to subject, I often feel more removed from the events of the real-world, rather than more connected—a paradox and refutation to the penultimate “liberal”, “eye-opening” education that college is supposed to endow us with. My thoughts walking from class to class center, not around the importance of global trade, or the ignominies of child trafficking— but rather, around whether or not I have enough money left in my dining account to buy a coffee for my poor sleep-deprived soul, or whether, yes, I did indeed forget my only homework assignment due that day miles away at my dorm. We are buried nose-deep in books-- but they are not the "relevant" books we may wish to believe.
From WEB’s 1917 protest, to Arab Spring, we should appreciate that venturing into real-world discussion is an eye-opening experience in itself. Rather than being respected solely for our “book” smarts, it’s a good time to be respected for our knowledge of worldly events, outside of the standard college repertoire. Regardless of how much we actually know, it's good to be interested in discussion.
As much as it is our obligation to be technically solvent, or professionally educated in our respective fields, it is almost our responsibility as human beings to be able to understand events of our modern day circumference. The issues of human rights, the issues of governing, the issues of everyday existence--they are pertinent to us, on a universally important level. That is, they are the issues of mankind.
I now realize that my reading of books had done exactly this: not only providing me with silent childhood joys, but instilling within me a sense of culture, reflection, and impetus for change within myself and the societies I habituated. It is in our knowledge of worldly issues that we are left humiliated but sensible--an acerbic demarcation of growing complexity in our boundaries and faiths.
Perhaps the greatest contemporary issues we face are left out of many of our classes. But to pursue these issues through our spheres of daily thought—one which may be found with the right perspective—is not an impossible idea.
