Senioritis??

Oh God, my senior year at Macalester starts in about 9 hours. What am I going to do??!!

No, actually everything is unfolding smoothly so far and I'm really excited about my classes. I got my books today and picked up a bunch of dusty old volumes that the Poli Sci department was giving away. I must develop an amazing bookshelf of dusty volumes!!

On Tuesday, Robert Putnam, the well-known author of "Bowling Alone" and an observer of political trends in the American public gave the convocation speech at Kagin. Essentially his point (and he asked us to summarize this way) was that after any disaster, such as 9/11, there is a positive spike in how people perceive the social connectivity of their society. That is, disasters bring people together. However, these spikes fade as events fade, and in most age groups the post-9/11 spike has faded.

Yet for some reason in our age band—late teens to mid-20s or so—the spike remains high. He drew a parallel to our grandparents' generation that experienced Pearl Harbor and went on to become extremely engaged in social life here, and their children, the boomers, really let things slide, and our generation was on course to slide even further.

And so now it is our generation's responsibility to generate new forms of social capital, translating to communities and new organizations, because for some reason we are still on that spike.

That was one hell of a convocation speech. After the event, I skipped the great picnic get-together and went to Taste of Thailand instead because I'm tired of Cafe Mac before having eaten there once!

Posted by HongPong at September 8, 2004 01:22 AM
Listed under Macalester College .