COLUMN: A ride back to the glue-eating days

From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger", Fall '99 From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger", Fall '99It wasn't until I was four years old that I finally learned once and for all that eating glue was bad for me. What could I do? Back in the day, I was a four-year-old battling with the demons of temptation. A miniature adult toying with real-life decisions (Elmer's or Glitter Glue?). A crayon-eating bad girl flirting with the thrill of imminent punishment in the Thinking Chair. I was ready to live -- to feast upon glue if I wanted to feast, to play Barbies when I wanted to play and to feverishly scribble multi-colored preschool profanities ("Doodyhead") on the walls when I pleased. I was the master of my domain, an autonomous Smurfette in a world of cookie-cutter Smurfs, a Snork ready to blip her way across the cartoon ocean. But on that fateful autumn morning on my first day of nursery school, as the other children rushed like brainwashed automatons to the "magical carpet," I savored my first bittersweet taste of reality. My teacher Joanne was not ready to put up with my four-year-old tomfoolery. In fact, she seemed less than amused by my gluttonous devouring of glitter glue ("Children, we must learn to SHARE!") and even less pleased with my Oscar-deserving "Dinosaur" performance in which I bit some girl. It was on that crisp autumn day that I learned that monsters weren't just under the bed, but all around. It was time for me to shut up, sit still and just eat my snack. And that was the way my higher education began. Sadly, Penn is a far cry from the magical carpet, and a further walk still from the Thinking Chair. As a disillusioned high school senior only a few years ago, eager to escape the company of high school students who had the personality of puppeteer-less sock puppets, I had, perhaps naively, thought that college life would reawaken the four-year-old in me. That the little girl who had been told to "be quiet and sit still" would be reborn. That the Locust Walk that my parents protested on in the 1960s would provide a place for me to question, to argue, to debate. In short, that the magic carpet of my college days would not be a place for people to sit still and be silent, but a place of intellectual conversation; a world where justification of opinion was as important as the opinion itself. Instead, I have found Penn to be a passive politician surveying situations but never diving directly into them. The comparison between students who know or care about international situations in the 1990s and in the 1960s is chilling. Are we silent because we are afraid to speak or because we don't know what's going on in the world? This past April, in a seminar I was taking, the professor asked how many students could locate Kosovo on a map. A timid two students in a class of 20 raised their hands. The professor then asked us how many students read a daily newspaper. This time, a shy three hands went up. This apathy isn't just limited to things happening in foreign countries. Students nationwide protested against the manufacture of college apparel in sweatshops but students at Penn were nearly silent. The sweatshop debate came and left Penn as quickly as yakpaks. Even the small number of students at the affirmative action rally on the Green last April was frightfully small. Have we lost our politics? Do we choose not to speak out because we have been trained to sit still and be quiet? Embarrassingly enough, more students showed up in efforts to end the dry-campus policy than they did to support or protest affirmative action or the war in Kosovo. Do we remain silent because we feel that unless issues directly affect us, they're irrelevant? I give the Penn student body more credit than that. A lot more credit. I refuse to accept that students simply don't care, because that simply isn't true. If politics was anathema on our campus, student organizations geared toward correcting, petitioning and educating other students simply wouldn't exist. So their mere existence on our campus suggests that people do care. But the deeper question is, why are these voices so silent? As children, we were trained to follow the rules. To eat our graham crackers at precisely 1:00 every day after our regimented nap. "When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut." To color within the lines. But perhaps it's time now, after years of boundaries and rules, for each of us to revitalize the demanding four-year-olds within us and to let them do the talking. Maybe it's time for the University community to enjoy a child's lack of inhibition blended with the maturity of an adult. Now, we can finally learn that eating glue is only bad for you insofar as it seals your lips together and prevents you from voicing your opinion.