the unfairness of it all

[turbogrrl]

It is true, life is inherently unfair. Worthy people suffer, evil prospers, war is random, and all systems are biased.

But there is another side, and it's not truth. It's excuse. "Life ain't fair, kid." It's the bully's justification to the victim, the exploiters to the exploited. It's a dog-eat-dog world, each to his own, look away, that's none of my business, not my problem.

Life is not fair. But I think that part of the human responsibility is that we try to be fair to those around us. It may be a quixotic hope of mine– I don't deny that much in human nature conspires to make such efforts laughable. But it's a choice we all have. We don't *have* to exploit every situation for our own gain. No one is demanding it, except for the human desire to be the ant on top of the dunghill.

...

And so I feel bad about school. I try to determine if my unfair advantages are balanced by my disadvantages. I try to determine if my abilities to be adult, write coherently, and be respectful are all due to my age, or if realistically, the people who are whining and cheating and doing poorly in class are the same people who whine and deflect and never do their share of the work in their later professional life, and my classes are just a mixed bag like every workplace is.

But I'm going to stand out in every class I take, and I do wonder if that is negatively impacting the people I take classes with.

Part of my frustration, of course, is that UMD just isn't a cutting-edge school. It oozes institutional complacency. I go to classes, I walk around campus, and no one is excited. There is no spark, no catalyst, no enthusiasm, no collaboration. And this long slog is agonizing without it.

Perhaps my high school chemistry teacher summed it up best:

"You know what you are? Yer strivin fer mediocrity."

Comments

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

I wonder about that too. But usually I wonder about it in an economic class kind of way; I have a very different background from everyone in my community college classes. Although while I do stand out there are others who stand out as well, one or two in each class.

[turbogrrl.livejournal.com]

Economic class does help a good deal. My parents teetered on the thin edge between middle-class and bankruptcy, and certainly their struggle to stay in the middle class benefited me greatly, even if I had to work three jobs to go to school that year I did. But I have found that despite class, curiosity and drive generally will force their way through someone's personality.

[vicar.livejournal.com]

Neat, agreed.

I hate people that use the "life is unfair" paradigm as an excuse to leave it that way. "If everyone thought like you, it'd suck more."

[turbogrrl.livejournal.com]

it definitely would suck more. *sigh*

[stemware.livejournal.com]

So should the motto be, "UMD! Striving for mediocrity?"

I wonder how much of the difference is a GenX versus GenY thing. Then again, when I was in college, I noticed a distinct difference in atmosphere between my college and the state college across the street. Most of the people at the state school seemed as if they were clearly there only because it was the next logical step after high school or because they wanted to delay the inevitability of the career world (this is a strategy that backfired because the job market was considerably better in 1989 than in 1993, and in New York State at the time your first year after college was generally spent in the same exact job you could get out of high school). But this isn't to slam state schools as there were private schools with the exact same atmosphere.

[turbogrrl.livejournal.com]

I think atmosphere has more to do with it than generation; I mean, these are the same things that annoyed me about my classes the first time around, but I was too self-absorbed (read: 18) to figure out *why* I didn't want to be there. I just hated every minute of it, while I loved working on difficult things in my job.

[frecklefaerie.livejournal.com]

Eh, returning students always set the curve and are most active in class. It was true 10 years ago for me. Maybe kids today are more immature than they used to be.

[csn.livejournal.com]

The proliferation of colleges in the US is due to marketing. The university that is a haven of intellectual excitement, I think, is the exception, not the rule.