Chris Banyas

Editor-in-Chief

First and foremost, I need to address something that I incorrectly stated last week. While certainly a portion of the tuition that each and every ISU student pays into the university does go toward the purses of the administration and employees, it is not nearly as much as I thought it was.

No matter where one is at with the pursuits they endeavor to excel at, one must always be willing to admit when one is wrong, and in this case I most certainly was. It is easy to become impassioned:  to look at the system, to bash your head against it, and most specifically against the impenetrable nature of the system, but a modicum of hubris quickly becomes a scarlet letter and this should never happen.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Sometimes the words of another can better express the feelings that an individual experiences, and this is most certainly the case with me.

After spending about five minutes acquainting myself with the ISULIVE “phenomenon” I found my humours exhausted, and the nearby well seemed to be calling my name.

The Vindictives were a pretty great punk band from the Chicago area formed in the ‘90s, and their song “I’m Sick” perfectly encapsulates my feelings after stepping through the looking glass and into the world of the youth of today.

Before you put down the paper as “Old Man Banyas” is off to the races on another rant, take a few minutes and look through the ISULIVE stuff…if you don’t see anything wrong there, maybe there’s something wrong with you.

“I felt like standing up and screaming above the roar of voices / Speaking about their daily nonsensical senseless la-dee-da’s. / I think I must be the only one, who is so disgusted and miserable, / I’m sick of being a human being. / I wanna crawl on the ground like a worm, or be an infectious germ, / I’m sick of being a human being.”

Are you back from looking at ISULIVE yet?

What will assail you is a litany of pictures of stupid young people doing stupid young people things…but there’s a catch to all this:  these photos/videos are permanently out there for all the world to see.

To say that I embraced my twenty-first birthday would be somewhat of an understatement: in the days, months and years that followed, I got up to no good on many occasions. I threw up on myself, acted a fool, made long distance jumps from front porches into the waiting maws of the sad green city garbage cans, embarrassed myself, most definitely offended people and generally contributed in a big way to my building depression. But that’s a story for another time.

Point is, young people always have and always will act like young people. The changing of the eons has no impact on this fact.

The difference is, when the circle of cavemen were engaging in chugging contests, and Big Willy threw up all over Trog’s beard, there wasn’t essentially an eyewitness camera crew in the form of a cell phone on the scene to document it.

I fight the daily pull of the cynic on my left shoulder that so often yells louder than the optimist on my right shoulder.

Segue.

If you want to dress like a whore for Halloween, you have my full blessing, but I think you should be aware of the potential consequences, the chief one being that eventually your children will see what you got up to in your youth. Should your costume escapades be documented in any way on social media, that documentation will be around FOREVER.

It also needs to be addressed that there is most certainly a double standard when it comes to what makes one a “whore.”

Herein lies one of the most readily apparent rifts between the social expectations/standards that males and females are held to respectively, and I use the term “whore” in this instance only because, in the words of Clark Griswold, “’Tis the season.”

Men are very much able to be “whores,” despite whatever your mother may have told you.

Don’t trust that old guy on the corner, your bank teller or your barber, make your own inquest into the realm of whoredom and come to the conclusion yourself.

Women – you should absolutely engage in whoreshaming men. Fight the power.

I think that the young people of any generation would greatly benefit from learning at an early age that their parents are, in fact, fallible, and, contrary to however they are living their life now, probably at one time embraced the YOLO lifestyle.

I will now castigate myself for using the above term for You Only Live Once, as I entered into a blood pact earlier in my life in which I promised that I would never do so.

I’m letting everyone down.

I don’t understand the apparent mindset of these people that are posting these “snaps.”

“Hey! Look at all this alcohol/weed/skin/gyrating hips/blasting nips!”

How myopic does it get? I mean, sure there is probably a whole demographic of people who are excited by such things, (and I just might be dead inside; a walking husk of a man) but wouldn’t you think for, ohhhh, I don’t know, maybe an extra second or two before posting that picture of you GRINDING ON A STRANGER?

It does delight me to no end to extrapolate this out ad nauseam.

“Daddy, what were you doing in this picture?”

Perhaps the correct answer would be “getting it.” Have fun with that conversation, Dad.

Chemical castration, ice-pick-lobotomy, and other various medieval methods of “altering” individuals were being spewed out of the cynic’s mouth to my left as possible solutions to the problem, in much the same manner as the contents of that dude’s stomach erupted forth in one of the snaps that I saw on ISULIVE.

For the record Spew Guy, anyone who would post a picture of you in that position is not only probably not your friend, but most likely is an asshole.

We are witnessing what is quickly becoming, in my estimation, the Doomed Generation.

You have but to look around you at any media outlet to see the negative effects that this kind of self exposure can yield:  people lose their jobs, people commit suicide, and even right here on our very own campus, student athletes that have images/videos of them get out showing indulgences in verboten activities quite possibly have been affected.

And it’s only going to get worse.

With the proliferation of recording devices, and the laws that exist in our delightful Capitalistic society, anyone in public is subject to the recording whims of another.

The rabbit hole runs deep, and somehow I believe that Lewis Carroll could see into the future, into the lifestyles that people would embrace.

The Cheshire Cat had it right: if you don’t know where you’re going, then it doesn’t matter which road you take.

In the words of Carroll himself, written in “Alice,” “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”