By Chaz Martin

I do not know about you, but I need to protect myself from the smiling paper clip that offers to edit my articles by way of a Microsoft grammar program. Every time the little metallic bastard appears in the right hand corner of the screen, he expects me to double-click him and listen to his suggestions concerning clarity and improvement. I don’t even double-click the girls I date, unless I am in an especially active mood, yet the computerized tin demands and demands that I “Avoid using passive voice” and “Flee from run-on sentences.” These comments are within reason. It is only when the bug-eyed paper clip suggests I remove the phrase “George W. Bush is a sodomite” and replace it with “Remember to purchase Windows 2001 Megadeluxe,” that I become concerned, frightened, and begin to ponder the doom you and I are now immersed in-the harsh truth of another semester: bent over on the bearskin rug of higher education, gripping our ankles against the oncoming madness.

Way back in the fluoride age of the fourth grade, I realized that bubble sheets and pep assemblies had joined forces to remove the possibility of any creative environment from my school world en totem. Yet after indoctrination through the beatings laid down by guidance counselors and pom pom squads, I pressed on, grade after soul-sucking grade. I took heart in the letters that sorority girls write every year to freshman, where the advice is laid down to “Go the Distance” and “Dance like no one is Looking.” There is probably a letter of this type in this very newspaper. Check in the Orientation section. I hope you enjoy it and that you can take it home to your parents, so you can post it on the family fridge, reading it for reassurance after the first keg party leaves you motionless in a stranger’s rumpus room.

I prefer to be a bit more realistic. How about a practical advice column to all of the new kids, free from posturing and a NutraSweet aftertaste? OK. First and foremost, do not watch the College Television Network. The Student Activity Center is laced with TV screens at every corner; I counted seventy-two in the workout room alone. They pump out CTN like clouds of opium, lulling the campus into an erect hibernation. The network’s programming is a menages e trios of Sugar Ray videos, slick advertising for E-Mail pagers, and random outtakes from Girls Gone Wild. The idea is that by watching it, you will get dumber and dumber as the days go by. That’s what they want. You will nod and pay your parking fines without arguing too much. You might want that unconsciousness. It would make everything so much easier to take. Ah bliss: to drink Cosmopolitans and listen to the Dave Matthews Band. No not today, you must maintain the kick in your stride, that strut you had when you were seven years old. You can feel your hyperactivity recoil under your Tommy Gear. Let it shine baby, let it shine!

Wait, let’s step back a moment or two. The real advice isn’t that the CTN Network is degrading, or that independent reading is more important than class, or that you should NEVER NEVER dye the tope of your hair blonde, while the rest of it is brown and claim that you have been frosted. All of these words of wisdom are important, and should be remembered. But from a middle-aged twenty one year old, the kernel of truth that comes to you today is this: You have much more to give to the world than it has to give to you. Most of America has stagnated and given up. Most of it is waiting in a line somewhere, clutching a white slip of paper, standing behind a fat lady, waiting for a red dial to finally reach #675.

You will not wait with them, because this is your year, kid. Oh-and it is not your year to make the dean’s list or the year for your dad to be proud of you. No, this is your year to pose nude for an art class, or better yet: for a bunch of artists in a worn out apartment. This is your year to start an underground newspaper. This is your year to write drunken poetry and yell it up to that girl’s window; you know, the girl you are looking at right now. Look around you. Is this world the way you want it to be? There are far too many people wearing shirts that read “Got Pitino?” and not nearly enough that are dirty, drenched with alcohol, and reeking of a good time. Come on, kid. You and me. Let’s run this school into the ground.Chaz Martin is a senior history major and a columnist for The Louisville Cardinal.