What is the root of our problem?

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 our selves, 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. What I mean is we have yet to resolve social tensions, racial tensions, tensions in one’s own SELF, so until we do this, 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 similars in the dining hall, still feel like we’re being constantly evaluated as we walk down the runway that is Comm Ave. So, 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 embracement 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 have raised us, telling us what was cool, who was hot. Now girls read Cosmo and feel a screaming urge to diet. They feel dingey 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 on their arm. They frost their hair-tips and buy $30 Abercrombie 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 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 urge my fellow students to pick up a book that deals with the spiritual, to go out and DO the things that gives them a mystical high-whether it be biking, backrubs, or breakdancing-and to find the most lasting form of fun and love, two things that keep slipping through our fingers while we chase the vapors called drugs and sex. I urge us-no-DARE us, to shed who we’re told to be and reclaim who we want to be.

Adam Friedman CAS ’03