Don't bother reading on. Go away. Preferably to another country. Instead of plodding through my quibbles and quotes, spend the next two minutes learning about the genocide spreading to Chad, or the double suicide bombs ripping through the streets of Iraq. Watch a New York Times clip of a dying Cameroon mother, abandoned on a dingy cot by a jaded doctor who pockets money from her family and promptly goes home for the night. Try YouTube; type "Darfur Genocide" into the search bar. You won't have time to click on every hit. So try one.
Trade my weekly chat for something more substantial. We're busy people; I understand you can spare time for just one thing or the other. So in the spirit of (my limited conception of) self-sacrifice, I implore you to spend your next few minutes reading and watching things that will shake you up, between bites of your bagel and sips of your bubbly soda. I don't think I'm up to the job.
In case you're still here, wondering why I'm writing a copout column in the most literal sense, copping out and effectively asking you to cop out with me, I confess the horizons I offer are limited. This particular truth hit me in all its nakedness back in fourth grade, when I spelled "affliction" with one "f" in the school spelling bee. True story. I remembered what it meant, but I couldn't recall what it looked like. I've been reminded of the metaphoric disconnect over the years, but my memory is occasionally violently refreshed. Like last week.
Last week was The New York Times Free Access week. Op-eds and video clips normally accessible only by Times Select subscribers were open to the unsubscribed public. In case this sounds less exciting than it was, let me make clear that as a college student in touch with my own frugality, I doubly love free stuff. So I Times Select-surfed.
Eventually the exploration became self-reflexive. I pondered what brought me to my computer screen, as I sat skimming the columns and blogs, almost as horrifying as the accompanying pictures. I was there firstly because I was concerned, and ultimately because it was free. Because there were no forms to fill out, no credit card numbers to punch into my unreliable web browser, no upcoming tests squeezing my brain into singular submission. This particular influx of information held no charge or trade off.
The images and sounds flooded my system, overpowering my senses and rewiring my nerve endings, and the question governing my newfound interest in Darfur and Chad was not "why?" but "why not?" Because after all, the knowledge-gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, mind-blowing stuff-was free.
Free stuff is always good, but truly free stuff is extremely rare, since on a college campus, time is harder than money to come by. Every event and activity costs you. It gets to the point where you find yourself doing a cost-benefit analysis as you make your weekend plans; watching a "free" show means two hours of your life perhaps "better" spent on a lab or a midnight rendezvous. Sure you gain, but you inevitably lose-since you're stuck doing the weighing in advance and not in retrospect. The safe route: Zero in on four or five tasks into which you can pour your semester's lifeblood; sadly, tunnel vision is not a malady, but the only way to get things done.
It's come to the point where flyers mean very little to me. The speaker may be interesting, but I usually never find out, because the "Human Crisis in North Korea" is not on my checklist this semester; the "Refugees Forced to Turn Back" are not on my list to save.
But peering through a little window, glimpsing (free of charge) the reality of a suffering world, the whispers come to haunt me at night. The priorities, the special interests, the areas of expertise seem as invaluable as ever; these will equip us with the means for effecting real world change. But in the spare time we didn't know we had, in our "free" time between bites and sips, in the time it takes to pick up a column and develop a tender fondness for the face pasted next to it-we can share in the pain of that other, other world, one not our own and not already scribbled in our planners. Maybe it will make a difference.
Today my column runs 100 words shorter than my last. That frees up 15 seconds of your time. Go away.
Jane Chong is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Wednesday.
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