Whenever Sid Smith transforms into a veritable Marrakesh market of posters and prints for sale, I get to thinking that in this place where deep thinkers congregate with the hope that classes in Marxist Philosophy will pay off, we, the next generation of scholars, are hurtling along a path of complacency, conformity, and mass consumerism.
The common paradox of higher learning is that while we strive to break down barriers and defy categorization, in the end many of us get our degrees and settle into a complacent, comfortable lifestyle that little resembles the hell-bent activism we embraced as undergraduates. The status quo swallows us whole. Think outside the box? Fuck, we become the box. Sure, some of us will go on to conquer the world and accomplish groundbreaking feats, but for the rest of us, our university experiences will be remembered in the same way a forty-something former-jock recalls his days as captain of the college football team. We coulda been contendas.
Our collective apathy has grown to such proportions that even our antiestablishment symbols have become little more than recycled institutions. We don’t go out of our way to make new discoveries, to be different from the young people who came before us. The pop culture icons we devour at those poster sales—Led Zeppelin, Scarface, Bob Marley, Warhol, Picasso, Van Gogh—were the same ones peddled to students thirty years ago. The Che Guevara T-shirts we parade down the catwalks of St. George Street were worshipped by rebel-wannabes in the 1970s. But even rejecting this behaviour is an exercise in futility. If you refuse to identify with the nerds, jocks, preppies, goths or geeks, does that make you unique, or do you just have an identity crisis? At least the moneyhungry business school types who dream of working on Bay Street know what they want.
Maybe it is our fault. If we care about the genocide in Darfur, we would learn more and help do something about it. If we are passionate about politics, we would spend our energy improving our communities. If we showed the same sense of urgency towards substantial issues as we do in our decisions as to whether we should boycott Starbucks—and get our pumpkin spice lattes somewhere else—we could salvage something from our university experience. No one is holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to act like self-important morons.
In the end, we will probably fail. The lofty goals we had as fresh-faced firstyears won’t seem worth fighting for. And that’s alright. Nobody expects us to save the world anyway. All we have to do is perpetuate the cycle of sameness that keeps our cookie-cutter world afloat.
And we’re doing a great job at that.
