Scott BresslerHere’s a story (hypothetical): Kid writes stupid, sexist, racist or whateverist letter to the editor to Student Life because he thinks it is funny. It gets laughs from some of the more cretinish persons on campus. Kid goes to class and acts dumb for a couple of years. Kid gets to senior year, graduates, and starts looking for a job. Kid Googles himself and finds this ridiculous letter to the editor he wrote a couple years ago. Kid thinks said letter is a poor way to represent himself to the employing community and tries to get Student Life to take it off the Internet.
Poor kid, right? Similar situations have been brought up in the Sweeney household back in Cincinnati, and my dad makes this argument: People change; a person shouldn’t get destroyed for the things they do when they are stupid and young. His case in point is a good one. Some kids like playing with fire (don’t we all), so they decide to build a small bomb and blow up some playhouse in one of the kids’ backyards. They videotape it. Two of the kids hide behind a tree and the other kid has the camera. The playhouse explodes. The kids behind the tree are fine, but the kid who is trying to film it is killed. In the final analysis, the kids doing this with him actually have to go to jail for being a part of their friend’s death.
The question is: Aren’t the kids going to feel enough regret for the rest of their lives about doing this one, stupid thing that killed their friend? Isn’t it going to haunt them beyond any punishment law could provide? Was it their fault any more than it was the kid’s who was killed?
We know the answers here. It’s a tragedy that is no one’s fault. A few people getting together and acting stupidly. First of all, nobody deserves to die for that kind of stupidity, although the reason that it is stupid is because death is possible, and second of all, nobody deserves the blame for collective stupidity like that. None of these kids needs to be held accountable for their stupid, momentary decision which nobody wanted to turn out the way it did.
The distinction between this situation and the letter to the editor writer is this: The kids playing with fire were being stupid, but only because there was a risk of a really bad result; the letter writer was being stupid and not just risking a comparatively less-bad result for the future but confirming it. The kids with the bomb were taking a stupid risk; the letter writer was being purposefully idiotic. His stupidity comes from the fact that if he had any kind of foresight at all, he wouldn’t have written the letter. You should be held accountable for your decisions that will clearly have future implications if you totally fail to take those future implications into account.
But it doesn’t matter if you should be held accountable or not. It matters that you will be. Most of us in college act as if we are totally immune to the real world. And it’s true that we are not actually there yet, but it is a mistake to think that there is not a bridge of causation that goes from college to real life. We don’t suddenly get a new body and a new history when we graduate-we remain accountable for everything we did in college, even if at the point when we did them we were livin’ free and not thinking about the future.
I hate to be Negative McNegativity over here, but the decisions we make now-both the good decisions and the bad ones-are decisions that have implications for our real life, even if we’re not actually living that real life yet. Drinking a lot now has implications for the liver you will have your whole life. Being a jerk affects what a lot of people are going to think of you until they die. Slacking off now has actual effects for you in the real world, not through grades but through its influence on your ability to think and work. And of course, writing stupid letters to the editor now gives the whole future an insight into stages you won’t be proud of.
So, it’s not always bad policy to do stupid stuff while you are in college, but don’t be selfish-think about how your future self will feel about what you’re doing, too.
Dennis is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences and a Forum Editor.. He can be reached via e-mail forum@studlife.com.