It is my first springtime at Vassar, and as I wander idly around the campus marveling at how it looks like a brochure the beautiful buildings and stunning flora, I find myself surprisingly content. Walking through the residential quad and seeing students playing guitar, ride bicycles and lying in the sunlight makes me fills me with satisfaction.
This week, my initial plan was to write a column about just being how happy I am, and about counting my Vassar blessings. When I proposed this to my editor, I was gently redirected: “It doesn’t sound like an Opinions article.” There was a general consensus that the topic “might not be suitable for the Opinions section of the newspaper.”
I acquiesced and racked by brains for a while for another topic, but my mind kept returning to happiness. It is certainly an opinion—albeit a simple one. With the complex issues that the Opinions section regularly tackles, happiness is a refreshingly simple subject. So let’s make it a little more nuanced and heap on the irony.
Why is there a sense that we can’t acknowledge when things go well? The opinions published in the The Miscellany News seem to tend towards blame, not praise. Is it because happiness is boring, or doesn’t address some interest or need? It may in fact be boring—and if you think so, you might wish welcome to stop reading now—but it surely is not irrelevant. I have to wonder how many people care particularly about the Letters to the Editor printed every week, or the columns we write, Vassar Verbatim emphatically included. If The Miscellany News only prints malcontented opinions, how many students look at the paper and say, “More whining?” Surely there are students here who are perfectly, you know, happy with how things are going. A Miscellany online poll in February, for example, demonstrated that a significant number of students didn’t do not think that they should have greater input into the College’s reaction to the financial situation in which the college finds itself.
This may seem ridiculous or sarcastic, or something, but I’m being quite serious here: surely someone can just be happy with the way things are on this beautiful campus in general without then becoming complicit in all of the flaws of society.
There’s something very difficult about saying, “I think things are going pretty well.” Even as I write those words, I think of obvious counter-examples, on and off campus: socioeconomic and racial inequity, looming faculty cuts and, in the broader world, enormous social issues of equity and world conflicts, to name just a few varieties of said imperfections.
But when I talk about being happy, I am not saying that we cannot disagree or try to improve. I am instead arguing that, at the end of the day, we should remember how lucky we are and to count our blessings that we are students at Vassar College. There is no shame, I argue, in appreciating our own happy situation so long as we work towards ensuring sure that everyone has advantages similar to our own.
The fundamental problem with a system in which people only have the opportunity to demand change is that those demands become paradoxically marginalized when expressing discontent becomes the norm.
It is a system that makes it too easy to dismiss genuine concerns as nothing more than people making mountains out of molehills. I am not arguing against dissenting opinions at all; rather, deprived of any contrast, a cavalcade of calls for change without any recognition of the good that does exist runs the risk of alienating the majority of the people who probably fall in the ideological center. “Crazy liberals/conservatives/communists/anarchists;” they say, “all they seem to do is complain.”
Of course, I promised you irony, and I am a man of my word. It turns out that I am not writing a column about happiness at all. This column has turned into either dissent, if you give me the benefit of the doubt, or outright complaint! It is a contradiction thatdeserves our consideration. I do believe there is a point at which the further rehashing of an issue no longer produces any perceptible benefit; the question is, am I saying anything worthwhile?
I am not arguing against criticism and disagreement, but arguing for stopping and appreciating the things on which we do agree, and the things that people have done right. The world has problems to be sure—-many problems, and I want them to be fixed. But it is springtime and it’s gorgeous outside—-I can afford 15 minutes to go and lie in the grass.
—Michael Mestitz is a member of the class of 2012 and an economics major. This semester he is examining amusing slants on Vassar life.
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