How about this? The thing I’ve learned in college is how the best option is to be relentlessly positive about everything. To recognize the joy in simply doing things, things happening, things simply even existing.

I’ve written a few columns in the last four years that have tried to incite or enter into heated debates—things on subjects like sexual assault, avant-garde art and the current controversy with the neighbors. For these columns, I usually get slammed, at least by somebody. Disputes like these are usually stocked with angry people looking for a fight, and in most cases, groups on both sides have reasons to be upset, because there’s rarely a black and white answer.

But what is black and white, in my opinion, is that the world is a whole lot brighter when one has the humility to leave those kinds of heated conversations behind. The word that might best describe this approach is a simple, often overused one: appreciation.

Dennis can be reached via e-mail at dennisjsweeney@gmail.com.

If I may, I think it is the willingness to appreciate things that are good that has been behind my most meaningful work with the paper, from encouraging a Thanksgiving staff editorial that was actually thankful, to pointing out, perhaps naïvely, some of the interesting peculiarities of college life, to capturing exciting events like flash mob dances on camera. While entering into the fray has its time and place in the development of a fair, progressive world, I find that life is much more worth living when, instead of criticizing the world, one focuses on loving it.

That’s been my primary revelation at Washington University, as I think might be true, actually, for most students. I (and perhaps you) did a lot of things from ages 0 to 18 for the wrong reasons: getting excellent grades because I wouldn’t let myself not, playing a sport each season because that’s what one did, hanging out with people who I may not actually have had very good relationships with because they were perceived to be somewhat cool, and so on.

Life in college, for many of us, represents the point at which we were finally given the opportunity to do, instead, just what we thought was the best thing to do. It became an opportunity to embrace life, to experience variety, now not because of external (or awry internal) motivations but rather because of a zeal for the things of the world. For this reason, I think, so many of us are fumbling around with plans after graduation. We have learned to embrace life for what it is, for the underlying enjoyment we get out of the thing, while many traditional jobs require us to embrace a single activity or cause, which often becomes disassociated over time from that underlying good.

But, fortunately, with such a point of view at the front of our minds, we can maintain an approach to the universe that holds onto that fragile energy and zeal. Such a task will become quite difficult, I am sure, in an environment without the vibrancy that we’ve all experienced here. But with the knowledge that many of us have gained on our best days, that simply doing, simply moving oneself from the bed in the morning can be done with an enthusiasm for the project of life at large, we might hope to avoid the dullness of routine, in favor of going with a sense of engaged appreciation through life. Many days, we will wake up tired. But that’s only because yesterday was so big!

It is perilous to step into an argument (recounted in “Student arrest spurs questions about zero tolerance policy,” [April 16]) that has caused both sides to seem, at times, quite silly. On the whole, University City residents have come out seeming dumber, because any support, explicit or implicit, of a zero-tolerance policy that immediately presumes guilt and then arrests the supposedly guilty parties is unjust, particularly when the offense is living in an apartment building where a party is occurring.

You will notice that on the north side of Kingsbury Avenue, the streets lack speed bumps and they lack signs that limit parking to residents.

Washington University students have seemed to take a more reasonable tone. (I refer largely to the comments in the above-mentioned article and “Students speak out against University City’s zero-tolerance policy at City Council meeting,” [April 14]) They recognize the right to protest certain disturbances, but they decry the authoritarian means used to quell such disturbances.

You will notice that in the Skinker/DeBaliviere area, at the corner of Waterman and Skinker, a set of church bells resounds every quarter hour in tones of up to 20 seconds in length.

I think the problematic crux of the argument, leaving aside the absurd extremes of arrests committed for ludicrously minor offenses and of students urinating and littering in residents’ yards, is the idea that students seem to have, and that residents seem to defy, the “right to party.” This crux is problematic because, as easy as it is to argue for the negative freedom from being arrested upon coming home from the laundromat, it is much harder—or, more accurately, it seems illegitimate in some way—to argue for the positive freedom to have fun by making a moderate to loud amount of noise and by enjoying the company of a whole lot of different people at once. One feels hesitant, however much one believes in it, to stand up in court and argue for the right to have a good time.

You will notice that at the corner of Rosedale and Waterman, another church rings throughout the neighborhood on the hour and the half hour; that at noon and six, its bells toll for an even longer time; and that on Sunday at 10:45 a.m., it plays a whole host of tunes unignorable to anyone within a half-mile distance.

For me, the problematic moral situation here—whether large quantities of “fun” ought to be shut down by the much slighter inconveniences they cause to others—pervades the college experience. I lived in an old dorm freshman year, and initially it was next to impossible to fall asleep until 4 or 5 a.m. on a weekend night if you, like me, had mononucleosis and needed to rest. But to my credit, I did not call the police on these nights. Instead, I dealt with it and by the end of the year had taught myself to sleep through anything.

You will notice that a college student doing his or her homework, trying to finish, say, “The Tale of Genji”, the oldest novel in the world, for Monday, will be able to make no progress whatsoever between 10:45 and 11:00 a.m. if he or she lives in the Residential Life apartments on Waterman.

But now, if I want to extend my practice to a prescription for University City residents, I will be told, “It is our right to be free from noise and disruption!” Well, sure. That’s why this article analyzes a problem instead of making a prescription; one can’t very well argue, morally speaking, that U. City neighbors ought to suck it up and allow us to violate laws even if it messes with what they think is their well-being.

But frankly, they should. It’s very easy to call the police about something you find annoying in your neighborhood, something that makes you feel just a little less comfortable. It’s very difficult—quite a bit more of an inconvenience—to be arrested, to go to court, to pay $250 for living in a apartment near a party or for—God forbid—hosting one.

For University City residents, calling the police may be an OK thing to do, a morally acceptable one, in some of these situations. But many students at the University, from time to time, operate according to the mandates of a different and far less easily argued-for rubric: what is cool, what is fun, what adds to the zeal of life.

And according to that rubric, the U. City residents at fault here are neither cool nor fun. They have no zeal for life. Instead, in the argot that might find its way into many of our mouths, they suck.

I am surprised at how little I had thought about these questions before they were brought up to me in a class, by Don DeLillo’s novel “Falling Man,” and by the photograph known by the same name. I know just where I was when the news was first communicated to me: walking down my middle school’s steps after the beginning of a school day for a dentist appointment, lightly singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” But I remember my reaction not because of the all-out shock the news caused in me, not because of an intimate understanding of the horror of the event that was taking place, but because those around me seemed to be affected by such shock, because some of the most self-possessed adults I knew seemed to be shaken in a way I had never seen them before.

It seems to me that ours is the first generation to have experienced 9/11 peripherally, secondarily, through the eyes of adults who knew its significance, without an understanding ourselves of the reasons why the day’s events were, for Americans, an unspeakable tragedy. Maybe I am just operating from my own experience. Maybe the kid who read every New York Times profile of the victims of the attack is more representative than I am. But for me, when I came back to school on the afternoon of September 11, and then again on September 12 and 13, the somberness that pervaded the hallways and the classrooms, the looks of despair on many students’ faces, resulted from the signals of our preoccupied history and English teachers rather than from a personal understanding of the event’s importance.

Thus, for all this time, I had wondered why, exactly, the attacks of September 11 were such a defining moment for the citizens of the United States who were, in 2001, older, more mature and had a better sense of the context of the event. I wondered, as a kid, hadn’t there been atrocities, genocides occurring? Didn’t thousands of people die every single day from HIV/AIDS? Weren’t there people right then, in the U.S., who could not afford food?

In a way, many of these concerns are valid. The tragedy of 9/11 was a tragedy in some part because it happened to a nation and a group of people to whom things like that were not expected to happen. It was the sudden contrast between total well-being in one moment and total suffering the next that made the event so horrific. In the innocence of being a kid, I dispassionately approached the day with an almost equally frightening radical relativism.

What I think I missed, and what those who had lived longer than me perceived, was the narrative dimension of the attacks’ aftermath, the insanity of what was occurring at Ground Zero, people filtering slowly down infinite staircases, people jumping from windows because of the heat. Buildings that were symbols of American commercial well-being, their very name capturing their centrality to our world, billowing smoke and then finally collapsing, with hundreds of people trapped inside.

What I missed, and what I think many of us might have missed in our confusion about events too fraught for our inexperience to understand, was the humanity of the thing, its sheer emotional effect. Many of us who are undergraduates now were too young to really get why the attacks were so gut-wrenching, too inexperienced with life and love to really be internally affected by them. For me, a turn to literature and articles composed about 9/11 and a photograph taken during its events allowed me to reevaluate them from a point of view now more informed and more emotionally in tune. For a generation in our late teens and early 20s, many of whom experienced the real shock of September 11 vicariously, a similar reevaluation—an effort toward understanding that day’s events from a more mature point of view—may be, by now, due.

Many of these minute protests, I have found, take the form of broad accusations of misogyny against these texts. In my view, such accusations, in a world where the problematic gendered nature of discourse and of human interaction has already been established, reduce a complex problem to a simple wrong on the part of the accused. Though an unthinking male chauvinist might be productively rebuked by an explicit denigration of his ignorant viewpoint, in the classroom, and in other venues where the stakes are more theoretical, one benefits quite a bit less from such broad criticism.

Allow me to give an example. “Forever Overhead,” a story by David Foster Wallace included in the collection “Best American Short Stories 1992” narrates a newly adolescent boy’s introspective visit to the pool on his birthday and the build-up to his plunge from a diving board after the story’s finish. The story is narrated in the second person. Its second paragraph identifies “you,” the protagonist, as an adolescent male. Among other signifiers of such a state is when “two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected.” “You” are, compulsorily, male.

A student might easily, and rightly in some ways, say, “This story is profoundly misogynistic!” His/her classmates would have to agree, both because the story disallows female identification, portraying the paradigmatic experiences of adolescence as solely male, and because the defense of a text accused of such a thing as the hatred of women would set the defendant up for a similar, if implicit, indictment. From there, then, no discussion proceeds. This “misogyny” remains a black mark on the text, but spurs no further remarks in the class. A blatant value judgment establishes the superiority of the students who have joined in diagnosing the text, and with grim but satisfied unanimity, other topics are raised.

It seems to me not only that such broad diagnoses of the text are unproductive due to their lack of rigor, but also that they undermine the purpose many of the finger-pointers try to advance by diagnosing the text. By identifying a very simple and very unjust fault in any text’s approach to gender, one eliminates the significant complexity into which more professional academic accounts tend to delve. This particular story of Wallace’s may allow readerly identification only in the biologically male reader, but in other places Wallace uses “she” as the generic subject pronoun instead of “he”; in the same story collection wherein “Forever Overhead” is found, he includes a story cycle depicting men as the often disgusting (or “Hideous”) human beings as which they might be seen by the other gender; and his fiction in general works against the narcissistic male-centered sexuality depicted by Philip Roth and John Updike (see “The Naked and the Confused” by Katie Roiphe).

In other words, Wallace’s approach to women, gender and sexuality is much more complex than a simple “misogyny.” To label his, or any, text with that simple condemnation eliminates the possibility for any serious consideration of those topics. To allow for nothing other than “misogynistic” texts and “not-misogynistic” texts further solidifies the male-female polarization against which an equal-rights point of view would argue. To eliminate complexity from such accounts precludes any productive, civilized discussion of gender and sexuality and allows only for laconic pronouncements by those who see themselves (in the view of this article, wrongly) as those topics’ greatest advocates.

In class, and in any consideration of gender and sexuality in texts, we should strive to engage in conversation that does not begin and end with “This is misogynistic.” The next step, after our collective realization that men and women deserve to be treated equally, is to develop more complex understandings of why, despite the good intentions of at least this institution of higher education, they are not yet.

Dennis is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at sweeney@wustl.edu.

Reggae musician and Hasidic Jew Matisyahu spoke in Graham Chapel this Thursday, March 18th. He interspersed an unscripted question and answer session with acoustic performances of a number of songs, accompanied on guitar by Wash. U. alumnus Adam Weinberg.

As part of EnWeek this week, the Engineering Student Council revived EnPageant, a talent and beauty contest between male student representatives of each of the Engineering School’s departments. This year, CJ Carey won a victory for computer science. See the full article here.

Then watch the Student Life video of student reactions to the tomato ban. You’ll hear, “It’s no big deal” and “I can do without tomatoes.” You’ll see, “I would like to have them, but I don’t mind not having them.”

Now, there are slightly more-heated opinions than that in the video, and there are much-more-measured comments under the online article. But I think there is a basic difference between the anonymity of online forums, and the medium of print in general, and the accountability that people find foisted upon them by the transparency of audiovisual recording: the tendency toward radical warmongering among written accounts, and the sensible, moderate consideration of issues among oral accounts.

There are two reasons, I think, for this disparity. The first is response bias. The kind of people who read an article and are moved to respond in an online comment probably feel more strongly about the issue addressed in the article than those who read it and move on, or than those who don’t read it at all. Video interviews have a higher chance of capturing the latter two types.

The second reason, to which I have already alluded, is the anonymity factor. I think anonymity is what allows those moved by certain articles to make the most shocking statements, things like “I think everyone involved needs to develop a thicker skin and just let it go” on the article about the Mothers bar incident. I imagine that it would be hard for that commenter to express him/herself directly in that way to the six students excluded from the bar.

This idea is not terribly new—that it’s the cowardly who shout most loudly from their keyboard, that those less opinionated are less likely to make themselves heard. But the disparity I am noting points to a trait that is prominent among, at least, Washington University students, but which is seldom conceptualized: We find it difficult to give valuable and constructive criticism in general, and we find it difficult to criticize at all people who are in the same room with us.

Have you been in a fiction writing class or another class where students workshop one another’s work? Such classes, teachers say, tend to be positively oriented, tend to shy away from what is wrong with each student’s story. “I really liked how x, y and z,” one might say, “but I was a little confused about the relationship between a and b.” When someone is just beginning their fiction writing career, the more valuable feedback might be, “I understand what this story is trying to do, which is x, but it does not do it, I think, because y and z.”

Now, face-to-face feedback is so valuable because it elicits this tendency to sugarcoat things; because you must take into account the intentions and thoughts of the human being whose work you are to critique, you moderate your own feedback in order to make it comprehensible to the person who has created the work. That value—the unavoidable, tangible, human presence of the object of critique—is exactly why we should learn to be better at delivering our evaluations, both positive and negative, of other people’s ideas and work. Because the person giving the critique must approach people critiqued on their own terms, discussion is likely to be quite a bit more productive, but only once we learn to formulate such critiques in the right way.

To take this a little further, I want to suggest that argument in the public sphere (in Student Life, The New York Times), which can be understood as a series of people critiquing each other’s ideas, would benefit immeasurably from the adoption of such a forum—but only if it were possible. If there were a way for people with different ideas to sit down in a room together and come up with a sensible understanding of the issue at hand, even if there are final disagreements in taste, we would all find ourselves more sensible people, for having such behavior as a model.

Unfortunately, I think the vapidity of argument in the public sphere is much more fundamental than the form it takes. It relies upon a collective ideological entrenchment that has itself developed into a matter of underlying values or, in other words, of taste itself.

When open minds meet, face to face, remarkable ideas can be produced. It is valuable that, at least, this can occur on a local level at Wash. U. We ought to practice such person-to-person critique more often.

Dennis is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at djsweene@artsci.wustl.edu.

“Blondie,” a slightly less up-with-the-times comic strip, took on the same subject Sunday by showing Dagwood’s coworkers extolling the benefits of new technology. Says a co-carpooler on the way back from work, “Did you know they have caller ID that flashes on your TV screen? Meanwhile, I get streaming videos on my cell phone!”

The fact is that Scott/Borgman (“Zits”) and Young (“Blondie”) decided to dedicate their weekly full-color, longer-than-usual strip to a depiction of behind-the-times characters watching in desperation as technology advances on their everyday lives. One can visualize the longtime reader of “Blondie,” as he cuts out the strip for his son and puts it at his son’s place at the table. The father sees in it an artistic expression of the technological frustration that he’s been dealing with increasingly for 20-plus years now and that his son seems to have somehow mastered.

The son comes down to breakfast, and he reads the comic. He gets it, more or less: Here’s this perplexed character who’s worried about the functionality of his microwave in the midst of a variety of newfangled gadgets that do lots of things that they weren’t really originally built to do. But instead of identifying with the perplexed protagonist, the son sees him as a caricature of his own father. His goofy, frantic response to technological change becomes a surprisingly apt characterization of the bizarre response of the older generation.

There is a fundamental gap here between the father and the son. It’s a gap that’s much talked about these days, especially in terms of the workplace, in books like “Bridging the Generation Gap” and “When Generations Collide.” We’re Generation Y, the Millenials, the Net Generation. They’re the Baby Boomers.

I think the most astute of us often consider these monikers irresponsible overgeneralizations, because for the most part they are. But it seems to me that, when you really look at it, there is a real, serious gap in communication, a place where language, or concepts, or views just don’t match up. It’s the place where older adults have other people “sign them up” for Facebook. It’s the place where they “boot up” their computers. No, we might respond. You just turn them on.

A similar thing happens in a recent article in The New York Times Book Review that describes the disparity in sex scenes between a raunchy earlier generation of authors represented by Philip Roth and John Updike and contemporary, much more sexually mild writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. In it, Katie Roiphe describes a couple of characteristic scenes in “Infinite Jest” where males’ worried anticipation of the sexual act is more potent than the act itself. “Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation,” Roiphe concludes, “there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.”

Right. Except it is not a fascination with such attitudes that these books display, but a possession of them. Throughout the article, Roiphe speaks as if the new more self-conscious approach to sex in literature were some kind of hip fashion, a “cool” attitude toward sex. Her account is something like Borges explaining a planet where beings experience life in terms of temporal, rather than spatial, unity—the planet’s language has no nouns. Roiphe sees, intellectually, what is going on in contemporary novels’ sex scenes. But, like Borges, she doesn’t have the language or generational assumptions to really get inside it.

Wallace, on the other hand, says of Updike’s penis-with-a-thesaurus effect, “I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it.” Forget that he was born six years before Roiphe. Instead, focus on the fundamental gap in communication: Roiphe and Wallace, our avatars for the Boomers and the Millenials, really fundamentally have no way to “get” one another.