At the risk of trite hypocrisy, I need to get a little bit of frustration out of my system. Feel free to pass on reading this one, I would my self.

What’s frustrating me? Among other things, Madison’s inflated self-image. The students here really seem to think they matter. Not that they don’t, in the grand scheme of things. Past graduates have and doubtless future graduates will go on to change the world for all of us. But that doesn’t excuse the rediculous self-infatuation Madison likes to indulge in here, where the students believe that their every opinion matters. I’m not talking about the people who get involved in clubs or orgs because they want to make their campus a better place for people to live, work, and study. I respect that a lot, and am in an organization or two for that reason myself. I’m talking about the people who think every minor point in every document they’ve ever read needs to be scrutinized, debated at length, and paraded before the rest of the school in the newspapers. Get over yourselves. Your actions and the actual good you do for the campus matter. An unintentional slight that some politician or another accidentally made and apologized for but you can’t seem to let go of do not matter, and the fact that you can’t get over it lowers your own respectability and credibility. Gah.

The other thing that frustrates me is people who don’t think. Especially at a university here, where we are all supposedly receiving an education, broadening our horizons, blah blah blah. Specifically, I am frustrated by people who don’t think about what they read or hear. Everything that is written or spoken was done so for a reason, with some motive. In an ideal world, the motive would be to share the news, or inform the public. In this world, the motive is generally to captivate and enthrall an audience of imbeciles. People who hear what they want to hear, and ride the emotional wave-pool generated by the speaker/writer. For instance, comments like, “People say Bush shouldn’t have started the war, but look at Truman, who started a war in Korea, which lost 55,000 lives.” Yes, ok. Look at the Korean War. My Grandfather fought in the Korean War. A lot of people died in the Korean War. What’s your point? To which the imbecile would respond “See? It’s not just Bush who’s started wars, give him a break.” Which simply proves that the imbecile is as dumb as his namesake. The real point has nothing to do with the war at all. The real point of that comment was for the speaker to keep the flame burning in one more brain-washed idealist and keep our country farther from true debate and more importantly, true compromise, unity, and progress. The same goes for the other end of the political spectrum, but I don’t want to waste the time opening cnn.com for an example.

So, sorry for the rant. Sorry for wasting your bandwidth and for sounding trite. Sorry for the hypocrisy, but maybe this will help offset it:

The motive behind me writing this post was to express my disappointment in people not thinking, and my growing frustration with people who take the worth of their opinions far out of perspective. I hope to sway you by your having read it, into thinking critically at least a little about the next one-sided comment you hear. I’m not asking you to agree or disagree with what you hear; I don’t care what you choose, I just wish you would think about what the comment says separately from what the speaker intends by saying it, realize when you’re being played, and then choose whether you want to be agree or not. And I hope you understand how hypocritical it is for me to have written this post.

Again, sorry for your time; hopefully you’re not reading this far.