I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been really upset about something since I came to Duke.
There was the time I wanted to watch a Keanu Reeves movie, and I dug all the way to the bottom of the Wal-Mart $5 DVD bin to get my hands on a copy of “Johnny Mnemonic” only to get to my room and discover I’d been sold an empty case. There was the time I was craving Honey Bunches of Oats, and I poured myself a giant bowl and then opened the fridge to an empty milk carton. There was the morning last year when I would’ve bet my life that it was Saturday when I first opened my eyes, but really it was Friday and I was late for physics lab.
Add to those three fingers the week I think I had the swine flu and the terrifying hour I spent after a hornet snuck in the crack in my window, and you’ve got my one hand’s worth of bad times at Duke.
That was how I was supposed to graduate, with a dump truck full of good memories and a handful of bad ones. My quota was met. Until two weeks ago that is, when I had to start counting on my other hand.
On the first day of spring break I awoke to find my group’s tent, a lovely green six-sleeper, lying in a crumpled heap in the middle of K-ville. Its poles were broken, its stakes were uprooted and its rain fly was flapping in the breeze.
Before you suggest that my group’s tent was structurally unsound or pitched improperly, consider the following facts. I would venture to say that students at this University know quite a bit about pitching tents. Aside from the tent itself, all you need is a tarp for the ground, some stakes that will hold and some guy-line to make sure it all doesn’t blow away in the wind. My group’s tent had all those things. My group even had an Eagle Scout pitch the tent for us. Our tent was as sound as a bell and as safe as the Bank of England.
At least we thought it was, until a random stranger decided to jump on top of it.
Our tent did not die of natural causes. Neither did the several other tents I saw that met the same fate. There is only one way to describe what happened. It was wanton destruction of property.
I’m not talking about anything I saw in “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” This wasn’t the kind of destruction that happens when jumbo-sized dumplings rain down from the sky. And it wasn’t the cool kind of wanton destruction that happens in the movies either, like in “Godzilla vs. King Kong” or “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.”
I’m talking about the kind of destruction that has become an all-too-common occurrence on campus.The guy who has nothing better to do in the middle of the night than rip down all the flyers and door decs in the dorm hallway. The gate-arms that get snapped off on a daily basis in all the campus parking lots. The light by the flagpole in front of Wilson Gym that someone put out with a brick. The paper towel dispenser that got ripped out of the wall in my hall’s bathroom. The fire extinguishers that get discharged, the trashcans that get knocked over and the chairs that get tossed off the Plaza—and these are just the things I’ve seen with my own eyes.
Try as I might, I can’t make any sense of this phenomenon of wanton destruction. Certainly, no one would happily skip around their own home smashing out lights and stomping trash into the carpet. And yet, exactly this happens in the dorms every weekend. Isn’t Duke our home?
Whatever happened to stewardship? Oh sure, we pledge to be good stewards of society. We even pledge to be good stewards of the planet itself. In clubs and classes and retreats we talk about caring for our environment. We talk about caring for ourselves and each other. But talk is cheap. Perhaps it’s time we start making good on our pledges.
Remember the scene in the Disney adaptation of “Pinocchio” when the boys run off to Pleasure Island? In the quintessential depiction of wanton destruction, Pinocchio and his friends giddily smash away at their surroundings. Sure, they have a good time doing it, but do you remember what happens to them as their behavior grows increasingly asinine?
Sooner or later, we must realize that we are defined by our actions. Words mean nothing. GPAs mean nothing. What you’re doing next summer means nothing. How we behave is who we are.
And sometimes who we are ain’t very pretty.
Daniel Flavin is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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