In the midst of our debates about BU policy, or even national or global policy, we are missing a more important point. We are forgetting to look inside and grapple with ourselves, why we do the things we do, why we like things and hate things.
The irony of making laws is that they correlate with a rise in social violence rather than a reduction of violence. Take the United States. It has one of the highest murder rates in the first world, AND one of the most bloated legal systems. So policy, I’m saying, only comes into being when a law leaves our hearts, stops being part of a shared, unspoken consciousness and suddenly needs verbalization, specification. Legality rises as compassion falls. Thus, talking about changing policy is a limited endeavor until we have grappled with more local conflict.
We have yet to resolve social tensions, racial tensions, tensions in one’s self. Until we do, we can fight tooth and nail over silly guest policies and legal jargon and still feel empty when we get into bed at night, still feel lonely sitting among our contemporaries in the dining hall, still feel like we’re being constantly evaluated as we walk down the runway that is Commonwealth Avenue.
The solution to these inner tensions? Find out where they come from in our own hearts and minds.
After much reflection and research, I think I’ve found a problem — it lies in our multi-billion dollar advertising industry that, since the economic boom of the 1920s, has grown into a disseminator of cultural values via a successful mass media. Through universal consumption of television, magazines, billboards and radio, ads have been shaping our self-concepts since we were children. Along with countervailing influences of school and parents, ads raised us, telling us what was cool, who was hot.
Now girls read Cosmo and feel a screaming urge to diet. They feel dingy if they’re not wearing their big black heels.
Guys see the cologne models in Maxim and feel like dorks for not having a skinny, large-breasted blonde in their arms. They frost their hair tips and buy $30 Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts in order to get more looks on the street.
All of this need for a certain look, fed to us by clever ads, stems from fear. We dress up in very particular ways because we are filled with the fear of being judged. Because ads tell us: “If you don’t wear this cosmetic or these jeans, you won’t look like this, you won’t have fun, you won’t be attractive to others.” We don’t look at people in the eye because we are suspicious of their feelings. When we hear people laughing behind us, we shiver with the notion that it might be “me” their laughing at.
“What? What’s wrong with me?”
Some of us may have gone partially insane. We’ve lost our minds, our very identities — all over mere corporate profit formulas.
I don’t like so much emphasis on the negative, but without placing any blame (and it would be silly to blame a magazine when so many people demand it), it simply hurts me … deeply … to see all these intrinsically beautiful people attach themselves to illusion, to their own fantasies and fears, and let it drown them. An outgoing friend of mine wagered that there are one in three college-age females with eating disorders, and a growing number of males. And how many friends do you have who are on Zoloft, Prozac or Ritalin? We’re talking recipients of so-called social progress. Are we happier than we were 10, 50, 100 years ago?
Can I ask for a favor? Give it a whirl, humor me: pick up a book that deals with spirituality. For starters, check out “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass, “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse and “Total Freedom” by J. Krishnamurti. Think about why you like things and hate things, what your very own conditioned thought-loops do to you. Stop looking outside for answers, learn to look at yourself. And do the things that give you a mystical high — whether they be biking, back-rubs or break-dancing — to find the most lasting forms of fun and love, the things that keep slipping through our fingers while we chase those vapors, drugs and sex. I urge us — no, dare us — to shed who we’re told to be and reclaim who we want to be.
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