Radicalism. This campus needs more. Fight me. A couple of weeks ago, some jerk ripped my clichéd rhetoric in my whiny article about Washington University not communicating enough with its students—about the University, the administration, as opposed to its student population. Said jerk, “Annoyed Reader” on the Internet, was right about the rhetoric. No need at all to steal Abbé Sieyès’ words on the Third Estate or to make a further distinction between the student body and its administration because the words “student body” and “administration” already exist.

Said jerk, though, exemplifies one of the problems with the universe post-turn-of-the-millenium—a total lack of radicalism. A kind soul defends me on the Internet against this original jokester, agreeing that the administration could be a lot more visible and intentional in their efforts to inform students about things that really affect them. His reasonful verbalizations make my arguments a lot more forceful and make me seem like less of a jerk myself.

But that’s the PROBLEM. We’re all so burnt out on rah-rah-burn-things-down that there’s no ability left to get excited and break some rules. We’re all so rational, so progressive in our outlooks, that we realize compromise is the only really effective way to get things done, and if you try to do anything with force it will merely complicate the matter and hurt more people than it helps. We all walk around the construction site. We all eat that damned Bear’s Den fried chicken.

For me, this is frustrating business. We lost a lot when we relinquished the tendency to believe we were the only people who were right in the world. We lost idealism. All of which is very funny because we (the “millenials”) are supposed to be the generation that thinks it deserves everything, that it is always right, that it knows everything. But that’s because we do! We’ve internalized relativism, we’ve admitted the necessity of compromise, we’ve accepted reality and we’ve understood the way it works. We DO know everything, and we know how to get done what we want.

But that takes all the fun out of being kids. Sure you can’t deck your coworker on the way to the fax machine because they took the last yogurt in the cafeteria, but you can walk through the middle of that construction site, and you can order 10 orders of chicken fingers and loudly throw them all away before you get to the register. And sure, all this hurts people and hurts organizations and breeds a sense of tension and negativity, but otherwise, you’ve got cranes in your backyard that don’t even know you exist. And you’ve got a food company monopolizing our stomachs that doesn’t understand how much we hate that meals with more than 100 percent of our daily saturated fat are the only things that don’t take more than 20 minutes to get on the South 40.

So, yes, radicalism does hurt people, and I’m sure I’ll look back on all of this when I’m 40 years old and have the world all figured out again and say, “Boy, was I destructive and mindless,” but for right now, I’d rather not go through my day feeling like I’m constantly getting screwed when I have the relatively culturally accepted ability to refute all of that screwing with a few semi-illegal gestures.

A little less sense, at this point, would be nice.