| Summary: | 6 OPINION theconcordian.org • Dec. 11, 2013 Alright, my sweatpants-clad, coffee-stained, tired, stressed and all around tired Cobbers, this week is almost over. One day we will all look back on this and laugh, but right now, instead of laughing, we are tired. The word seems almost innocuous, but at least for me, it is the only word that aptly describes how I feel. While usually I have a pretty sunny disposition, it is always at the ends of things I get a bit of ennui. I am annoyed with myself, having spent the semes-ter playing around and not doing enough. I am annoyed with how short four years seems. I am an-noyed with the fact that there seems to be only two tracks for life: have a job and be boring, or do not and be weird. This is my last “before Christmas” article, and as such, I am a bit weirded out. I am creeping ever so closely to the dreaded date of graduation. I keep making mental lists of what I do and do not have. I have a job, I have friends, I have fun. I do not have a plan or anything else. I have Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, Hulu, Netflix, a mental dossier of pictures, gifs, shows, movies, actors, charac-ters, story arcs and Twit-ter comedians, who could express my feelings better than me, at my disposal in a file labeled “cans and cannots.” I could recite to you spells from “Harry Potter” and “The Vampire Diaries.” Am I slightly concerned for myself ? Yes. But one day I will get there. “They” call our gen-eration — the Millennials — lazy, unappreciative, waiting and driven by technology. I think they are wrong. Maybe I am biased, but I have never met a person here with those traits. I see a school and community full of kids who are passionate, scared, fiery and in tune with each other. I love that at our school, while we have our differences, there is an overarching theme of understanding because we coexist. I may not be anywhere near the same as you, but I hope to the ends of the earth you get what you want, because that means one more person in the world is making it better. We are waiting for some-one to give us the reigns, someone to tell us it is ok to just go for it. With the amount of connectivity we have with each other, we see others living their lives, and it becomes an-other Netflix original. They are living a different life than us, and we want that. It would not be nearly as interesting if we did not have friends with kids, husbands, wives, intern-ships or tragedies that we do not have to participate in but get to watch with a strange, voyeuristic in-tent. We are trying to be the kids Mr. Rogers want-ed us to be; we do not want to be anything like our parents, but we do. I think daily about what our generation will be called in fifty years, what our kids will wear on decade days to mock us in twenty, and what we will think of ourselves in ten. Maybe there is a weird fuzz around the holidays this year, because for once in my life I am taking off ten consecutive days to just be at home with a cat that hates me. I am going to hang out with my dad and his bleached Santa beard to learn something. What I am getting around to in my strangely sad and existential way is that we have work to do. We have so much work to do, because while we feel young and unimport-ant, we cannot go on like that. We have to work for the world we are going to inherit, because if we do not, we do not deserve it. • Not your usual sunny disposition Santa the socialist Well, it is Christmas season once again, time to go out and get all the gifts for our friends and family, watch classic movies and spend time with loved ones. As the days grow shorter and Christmas day draws nearer, we must also re-member that one person everyone seems to love this time of year. I am talking, of course, about that fat slob up in the far north: Santa Claus. This is a man who the world adores but whom we should really despise, a man who takes advantage of global generosity and naiveté to grow fat and lazy at the public’s expense. In short, Santa Claus is a so-cialist. The signs are there for anyone to see, if you look closely. Santa only works one day a year, while on the other 364 he sits around and does nothing. The one duty for Santa is to deliver the gifts to children around the world on Christmas Eve, but the stories never say what he does for the rest of the year. We have pieced enough information together from various sources, however, to have a good idea of what goes on. For those other 12 months of the year, Santa eats, sleeps and sits around at the public expense. Food and board are paid for on the public dollar, he gets un-limited vacation time when he does not have to drive the sleigh and he does not have to pay taxes. This man is dependent on government, with no external means of supporting himself. There are other worry-ing signs besides his per-petual laziness. I turn now to his treatment of his work-ers, the “elves.” These are workers with no time off, no sick leave, no health in-surance and no prospect of their lives ever improving. They toil 365 days a year in virtually slave-like condi-tions, mindlessly churning out products while their boss gets fat off their labors. This boss does not lift a fin-ger to help his employees, and revels at his own self-ish gain at the expense of the many. Is not socialism a system where the many are poor and downtrodden, the privileged few exploit-ing their labor for selfish gain and there is no middle class to restrain them? I see no middle-class amongst the “elves.” They are the slaves of Santa the socialist, for-ever chained to his shady enterprise at the North Pole. No wonder Dobby ran away. The most serious, and worrying, sign of Santa’s Socialist nature is his global Big Brother empire. Santa “Sees you when you’re sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake.” Santa does not trust the people of the world to be good, so he spies on them day and night to ensure their compliance in his selfish socialist em-pire of supposed “cheer” and “joy.” The NSA pales in comparison to Santa’s intelligence service. Soon, he will be delivering the presents by drone, and woe to the naughty children who step out of line… This madman must be stopped. People of the world, we must rise up against this socialist Santa, a man who cheats the system for his own gain, exploits slave labor and spies on the chil-dren day and night to ensure total compliance. I will not do it for you, but rearrange the letters in “Santa” and tell me what you come up with. We must replace him with a capitalist Santa, who will pay his taxes, work 9-5 during the workweek, re-spect people’s privacy and give his workers holidays, health care and fair wages. We must not allow such tyranny to go unpunished. We need change up at the North Pole, change that we can believe in. • MARK BESONEN, POLITICAL BLOGGER The new Christmas Old Christmas is dead, but hold your tears and do not mourn quite yet. The New Christmas is worthy of all your joy and praises, but more impor-tantly, your money. The Old Christmas feelings of cher-ishing what you have and re-joicing in what you can give others is gone. Now we get to look forward to the new most wonderful time of the year. We ought to sing an ode to the wonders of pure un-fettered capitalist consump-tion, because, let us face it, the Pope was wrong. Is it not ironic that it took consump-tion to expand the twelve days of Christmas? Once companies realized that people would willingly skip their Thanksgiving meals and “all important” time with the family to stand in line for hours – in some cases, the whole day – just to get that all-important, fifty-inch plasma television, our chances at keeping Old Christmas alive were gone. New Christmas, thank-fully, is much better than Old Christmas. Old Christ-mas was boring; we had to spend time with those bor-ing family members who we only have to see once a year. With New Christmas, we can hide out with the latest video game console (which are meant to “console” you) and ignore all those family members we really did not want to see anyway. Or you can spend your time at the mall. I hear the latest cloth-ing stores have some re-ally sick discounts around Christmas time; does that not sound better than spend-ing time with boring old gram-gram – have you seen the sweater she wears? Let us throw out Old Christ-mas as fast as we can ditch grandma in favor of the BOGO sale down at the shoe store. Rather than just have Thanksgiving be a national shopping holiday, we should move it to Christmas too! People can take the whole day off of work just to rush early to the nearest electron-ic superstore to stock up on tons of other distractions. All of these will help you to continue ignoring those family members whose presence is really just a bur-den. A quick word of caution regarding family mem-bers: make sure you spend enough time with them to still glean some decent gifts out of them. Spending that extra twenty minutes with your great aunt could snag you a decently sized gift card. Do not pass up those opportunities. New Christ-mas is all about maximiz-ing gift potential across all areas, so if there is a quick reward for nodding off through another war story, go for it. Old Christmas was about forcing you to spend time with family members, and no one wants to do that. New Christmas is about choosing to spend time with family members, but only if there are gifts involved. Christmas is no longer about family presence. It is now about family presents. Be thankful for all you have this Christmas: the gifts — not that other stuff. • AUSTIN KELLER, POLITICAL BLOGGER Two political bloggers off er their satirical thoughts on Christmas Being a person who is a studio art and communications double major, I could not count the number of times those who study primarily math and science comment on how much easier life as a non-science major must be. Yes, those of us focusing more on the arts normally do not have to spend weeks memorizing vo-cabulary and perfecting equations, but just because we are not does not mean that our brains are not working hard too. It just happens to be working hard in a different way. Those who devote the majority of their education studying the math and sciences spend a lot of time using the left side of the brain, which is primarily where language and logical processing takes place. Those of us who spend our time practicing music, painting a pic-ture, creating a fictional world or some-thing else along those lines are primarily the right side of the brain, which con-trols creativity and emotions. Of course, it is not an either or situation, but more of a continuum of how much an activity uses which side of the brain. Each side is important, but those who do most of their learning using the right side seem to receive flak from those left brainers. However, as stated on the School Su-perintendents Association website, what should be recognized is that the arts “are a collection of skills and thought pro-cesses that transcend all areas of human engagement.” Just some of the positive effects on cognitive thought of the differ-ent arts include: dance, which helps de-velop gross motor skills; fine arts, which help develop pattern recognition as well as the ability to differentiate between the real and imagined; and music, which can improve special-temporal reasoning. If that does not give some insight into how the arts are beneficial, then read some facts. One study in particu-lar showed an improvement in students’ abilities to form mental images and form connections after only 10 minutes of lis-tening to Mozart. SAT scores were on av-erage 103 points better for those students who took coursework in the arts than those who did not. And lastly, people in the arts have been found to have higher self-esteems. If any of those little factoids did not convince you science buffs that the arts are important, then I challenge you to challenge your critical thinking skills by going out and taking that painting class, Zumba lesson or even something as simple as walking through the Cyrus M. Running Gallery or attending a theater production here on campus. What could be so bad about exercising both sides of that weird-looking muscle inside our skulls? • Letter: Right-brainers HILARY THOMPSON ‘14
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