Catastrophe bursts Yale's protective bubble

BY COLLEEN KINDER

I remember going to a Master's tea freshman year featuring a famous journalist who offered his audience the following parting advice: "Keep up on world events and take the time to read what is going on outside of your campus gates." He warned us of the danger of ignorance in the college bubble. His words have always stayed with me and been a source of guilt—guilt that I know more about my university's administration than the American president's, and guilt that I have no idea where the last earthquake hit in the U.S.

ILIANA BOUZALI/YH

People have been criticizing the bubble that college kids live in for years. And they should. Other than the handful that keep the Washington Post as their home page, we are completely cut off from the world in which we live. And in today's global society, we have no excuse—we barely have to move a finger to get the news. But regardless, we choose to be uninformed. We read every word of a two-page article about Yale's tercentennial gala, but only skim a short one about the latest United Nations conference.

We take in every bit of what a college career at Yale offers us—wonderful people, amazing professors, seemingly limitless resources, diverse opportunities, service to a city. We play the osmosis game, fill our college bubbles to the breaking point, and don't worry too much about our isolation and ignorance. We have plenty—too much, even—to take in at Yale, and only four fleeting years to eat it up.

When we return home and reacquaint ourselves with the world, we experience a bit of culture shock within our own culture. We are astonished when we find out that the economy has been lagging for months, a vaccine for chicken pox has been discovered, and there is some kind of energy crisis in California. Our oblivious state shocks our parents even more, and they wonder whether their $35,000 checks actually go towards making us more ignorant, rather than more educated.

But when I returned home this summer, my eagerness to return to the normal world and catch up with what I had missed quickly wore off. I was shocked by the news, not because so much had happened that I should have known about, but because so much of what was being printed and broadcasted were stories that I was glad not to have been following each day. I was sitting in my doctor's office and heard the news anchor begin, "New developments in the Jon Benet Ramsey case..." My first thought was, "this show must be a re-run." How could people still be interested in this story that was going nowhere from the day it broke three years ago?

The main news story of the summer, though, is what really turned me off. Shortly after my bubble popped, I realized that when people chatted about a "Washington intern," it wasn't because Monica Lewinsky had done something obnoxious enough to get back into the news. The nation had actually moved on to another young intern, and I would hear more news about Chandra Levy in the next three months than I ever wanted. Well, it wasn't exactly news—more like updates of non-occurrences. After all, the most gripping story of the summer relied on two ingredients: absence and silence. A woman was missing and a man wouldn't talk about it. I observed at home and at work as those around me couldn't get enough of intriguing headlines such as "Washington Intern Still Missing" and suspenseful footage of Gary Condit walking from his office to his car.

I saw that for many people, living in the "real world" and keeping up with current events means making the people on the nightly news characters in their daily soap opera. As the outsider temporarily visiting from my bubble, I was surprised to find that I often felt much more in touch with the tragic reality of the Chandra Levy story than the people who had been reading the commentary daily and entertaining all of the theories. Therefore, resolved not to be bogged down by salacious and drawn-out stories, I kept my distance and retreated back into my bubble.

The bubble was a grand place to be until a commercial jet crashed into the side of it and woke me from my peaceful slumber on Tues., Sept. 11 at 9 a.m. I stared at images of a familiar skyline filled by gray smoke, and had only one question: "Why?" What could have happened since I stepped out of the world to make someone take such extreme action against my country? More questions were to follow as I realized that I knew so little of foreign affairs that I couldn't make the least bit of sense out of the loss of thousands of New Yorkers. I envied classmates who could cite the U.S.'s conduct at the last U.N. conference as an possible impetus for the attack. In fact, I envied anyone who knew who this Osama character was at all.

I longed for awareness and resolved to never lose hold of it so completely again. I saw that awareness not only allows us to comprehend, but to empathize and let a distant catastrophe resonate in our own lives. It is so easy to be unaffected by news of a mudslide in El Salvador, but it will never be quite so easy again. Not now that I have watched thousands of fellow citizens crushed in an instant and come home to hysterical friends. We all, unfortunately, now have faces to put behind the numbers.

It is a shame that the media and the American people focused their energy on a stagnant scandal for the past three months when there was so much real trouble brewing among sinister forces abroad. I don't doubt that plenty of people who watch TV and read the news daily were as caught off- guard as I was by the attack. They had been enveloped by the more immediate, relevant, and entertaining stories of their homeland, just as I was engrossed in the more immediate, relevant and entertaining aspects of my college life.

It is clear to all of us now that we have no magic shield around us, our country is not impervious to attacks, and we cannot, even if we try to, live in a bubble. 

Colleen Kinder is a junior in Morse.

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