Great (and Terrible) Expectations

Like most students during the "blog moratorium", I used my blog-free time following the inauguration of Barack Obama. I saw it with my own eyes, and then I looked around the room. Nothing had changed. The ground didn't quake, the sky didn't fall, and the country was still in an economic slump. The hype leading up to the inauguration was more ground breaking than the actual event. With the way I had read about it, seen news stories about it, and heard about it from friends, I expected many things from the inauguration. First of all, I expected someone to try to kill the new President. Don't get me wrong, I definitely DID NOT want that to happen, but I had heard from every news channel that the president was "beefing up" security because of death threats and suspicion. I learned that his limousine had 3 inches of steel covering the doors. I also learned that he wore a bullet proof vest when he delivered his acceptance speech, and that he spent millions more than any other president on security for his inauguration. Secondly, I expected that everything evil in America would disappear. In a way, President Obama fulfilled some of that expectation. He shut down Gitmo on his first day. It is a great start, but with the way the media had hyped him, he APPARENTLY should have cured cancer by now. I guess President Obama "transcends race" but he does not transcend his own humanity. Besides, he is only 12 days into the job. Personally, I'll give him 4 years to change the world.

WWTD? (What Would Thoreau Do?)

Irony is a funny thing. Walden Pond, chosen for its suclusion by Henry David Thoreau, is now a tourist attraction."There were nearly 74,000 visitors in the month of June" says The New York Times. People are coming from all over to see the iconic symbol of American thought that is Henry David Thoreau. This makes me wonder, would Thoreau like this pilgrimage? When I read Walden, I got the impression that HDT wanted us to live our own lives, not his. People that go to Walden Pond are searching for something. They want what HDT found. However, Thoreau says himself: "Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it" (6).
We must take a step back, and realize that HDT is now our senior. We now must break away from Thoreau's experience. We each need to become Thoreaus and Emersons and find our own Walden Pond. After all, Thoreau even said: "The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors" (6). We need to find our own path.

"Attention Holiday Shoppers!"

It's only December 7th, and I can already hear it...
"Attention holiday shoppers! There is a 45% off sale on something you don't need! Aisle 5!"

Yes, it is that time of the year again. The time of the year when kids get what they asked for, and parents feel the budget crunch even more. However, even the kids don't stay happy. They play with their holiday presents for maybe a month or two, then it gets shoved in the back of the closet, packed up right next to last Christmas' tennis shoes you swore you would wear, but never got around to wearing. I am a teenager on the North Shore. This scene is all too familiar.
I noticed this occurrence before, yet I haven't been able to put it into words until after reading Thoreau's Walden. He talked about the difference between the "need" and the "want" for something. He talked about using only the essentials to survive. The movie that we watched in AS put it as "Un-cluttering his life". I could not agree with Thoreau more. We are bred into the thought that bigger, greater, and more is better. We complicate things, and therefore, we are unhappy a month after Christmas, when the material object we used to fill the void in our lives has lost its lustre. We have a need for more "stuff" because we want to be happy. The obvious question is then: why are we so sad?
I think it is because we have lost ourselves in our routine. Have you ever noticed how nice a half day (like the one last Friday) is? We get to breathe, and see a new side to the 3 and a half hours that we usually spend in school. We tried something else. Another example is the typical "north shore soccer mom". You usually don't see these people happy on a regular basis because they are genuinely bored with life. They spend each day waiting for something exciting to happen, go to bed unhappy, and start the day over again. So then they say to themselves: "I bet that brand new tennis racket would change up my routine!" So they go and purchase it, and it soon takes a back seat to the next tennis racket they buy five months later. The amount of money we spend to make ourselves happy is ridiculous. Is there an answer to this vicious cycle of discontent? Perhaps we will find out in Walden...


Does money buy happiness? The guy in the picture sure seems like he digs it...

Bike Trip

(This may seem personal, but bear with me)

Over the past summer, my parents confronted me by saying that I needed to do something that would really bring me out of my "shell". They proposed that I go on a trip of sorts. So I did some researching (by that, of course, I mean Google) and I found a popular hiking/biking/service program called Overland that stretches across the United States. I was enticed by the "American Challenge". This is the trip where bikers cross the United States (literally from ocean to ocean) with 2 leaders and 12 high-schoolers. When I told my parents that I wanted to consider this, they asked me: "Why this trip?" A valid question; and one I didn't have an answer to until reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, History. Emerson says that one should learn from experiencing life, not by reading about it. He says: "Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain words" (7). Of course, Emerson is talking about history, and not a bike trip, yet I still feel the same message applies. One cannot learn about himself by going through the motions at his old life. That is why my parents offered the suggestion of a trip in the first place! Emerson keeps me in check by writing in his other essay, Self-Reliance: "He who travels to be amused, or to get something which he doesn't not carry, travels away from himself...Traveling is a fool's paradise" (34). Aren't I traveling to gain confidence? This quote unnerves me because I feel that if I go on this trip, and gain nothing from it, it will be a waste. I am not going to study, to do service work, or to learn from art, as Emerson qualifies that past statement. I am at a standstill as to what to do. Maybe I should be a little bit more self-reliant, and decide for myself!

If anyone who reads this has done any trips with Overland, please comment on what you thought of it!

The Self-Reliant President

While reading the immensely "dense" text of Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I deduced that this essay was meant to help a person going through a questioning time in his/her life. I define "questioning" as a time when one questions their beliefs, their morals, or their way of living. It is a guideline of how to live "correctly", according to Emerson. Anyway, while reading this essay, couldn't help but to look at the world around me, and wonder who needed Emerson's help the most. Senat... excuse me... President-Elect Barack Obama's name came to mind. He is going to need to rely only on himself during his term. He has to single-handedly bring the U.S. out of an economic nightmare, manage the war in Iraq, and stop global warming (all the while living up to the gigantic expectation of him because he is the first black president). He has to be self-reliant or he will be a huge bust. He cannot listen to everyone's opinion. He has to continue to do and begin to do whatever he said during his campaign. Take a note from Self-Reliance, Mr. Obama. Emerson says:" Trust thyself...Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being" (20). What Emerson is saying here is that the "Great men" of their time have known that they aren't perfect, but they trust themselves enough to take control of a situation, and they always go with what their heart tells them to do.

Perspectives

This has been an eventful year for Trevians.

Rev. Meeks came to protest school funding, the stock market plummeted (which directly affects North Shore children), and the New Trier soccer team won the State Tournament. That's a big year for us, right?

However, this has been an even more eventful year for the world.

An African-American has been elected president. Just think, roughly 40 years ago, the civil rights movement swept over the United States, which eventually led to total equality throughout this country. Barack Obama even mentioned the story of Ann Nixon Cooper in his victory speech. She is 106 years young, and she cast her ballot last Tuesday. She was a woman who was around when African Americans were segregated, brutalized, and looked at as inferior. She is alive to see a fellow African American become president. Not too long ago, there was a hoopla over Ruby Bridges going to an all-white school. She is even alive to tell the tale. I guess the point I'm trying to make with this post is one of awe. I encourage you to take a step back, take a deep breath, and look at your life compared to that of 1965. Kinda puts the State Soccer Tournament into perspective, huh?

Last Place Isn't What It Used To Be...

During a class discussion on the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the issue of equality was immediately raised. I'm not going to bore you with the entire discussion, because you were there, but for those of you who were spacing out, I'll give a brief overview of what led up to the point of this post. I think Mr. Lawler said: "Remember when you were 7 and playing in a soccer tournament? Remember how everyone got trophies at the end? Is this total equality? Is this good or bad?" Again, sorry Mr. Lawler for probably butchering the fantastic point you made, but I got the idea through. Anyway, this got me thinking: "Is competition good for America?" I know most of you don't like the opposite of America's Capitalism (Communism), but our society breeds kids to do anything to win. These kids will likely end up leading our nation through businesses and corporations. Think Gordon Bombay in The Mighty Ducks.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be winners and losers, but I am simply an advocate of giving trophies to all the players participating in the tournament. On a bigger scale, I have to be careful. Yet I still try to keep that mentality when thinking about the stock market crisis that has seemed to disappear from the headlines of newspapers. For instance, I think the Bailout Plan should have been passed. I think the innocent people who invested their money in a "fool-proof" company should not be punished the way they did. I think that everyone deserves a trophy. Even if it is for last place.