“Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing / I’m very scared for this world / I’m very scared for me.” REM wrote that in “You Are the Everything,” off 1988’s “Green.” It resonated around my head this morning as I rode to school.
I’m getting closer to graduation, and I’m getting closer and closer to joining the mainstream headlong. I’m just a little scared.
I’ve spent the last 28 years of my life holding strong beliefs that are left of center, and I intend to continue doing so. But it’s easier to say that when you work a crappy service job somewhere, and you have the time and ability to pull back and say, protest the Gulf War in San Francisco, or spend weeks working on an idealistic hippie ‘zine to distribute at the Burning Man Festival. It’s even easy now to skip classes and go march in the streets of Seattle against corporate globalization.
When I graduate, however, I fully intend to get a mainstream job at a major daily somewhere, going about the business of putting out the mainstream news to a mainstream audience. Sure, I can push the envelope a little, but what of protesting? Not supposed to do it. Compromises journalistic integrity. What about publishing my own ‘zine of leftist dogma and rants? Not supposed to do it. Most newspapers want you to work only for them. Sort of an intellectual property thing.
What will be left of me and my hopes for a better world where people respect human differences, where people work with control of the fruits of their labors and where people enjoy each moment of life, instead of waiting to enjoy life at some fictional later date? Will I just be absorbed into the mainstream, unable to effect any change?
What’s the typical college answer to any pressing question? Talk to an adviser. So I did. I spoke with Pam Cytrynbaum. She gave me a pep talk that helped me remember the excitement of fighting for the good. She told me stories about covering racial injustice in the court systems of Louisiana at a newspaper that wasn’t necessarily sympathetic. She reminded me that one-on-one interactions with people are incredibly effective at producing social change.
“Get in to where the damage is being done,” she said, her hands clutching the air as if to take social injustice by the shoulders and give it a good shake. Her advice continued, her energy unflagging even first thing in the morning. Be vigilant. Pick your battles. Live every aspect of your life through your beliefs. Deconstruct every word of what you hear. “These things can be small, but the effect is massive.”
By the end of the conversation, I was animated and upbeat again. Thanks, Pam. I found the rest of the day’s interviews and conversations a little easier, and I tried to remind myself to push the envelope with everyone, everywhere.
I guess, no matter what, if I retain my ideals and I remember the urgency of youth, I can make whatever I want out of a mainstream experience. Or maybe I’ll discover that the mainstream isn’t what I want (after I pay off my college loans) and work for an alternative weekly paper or a leftist organization that shares my ideals. Maybe my ideals and the real world can come together in some productive way — if I don’t hold a preconceived notion that the mainstream world won’t allow my kind of change.
After all, just two songs later on “Green,” REM writes, “This is my life, and / This is my time. / I have been given the freedom to do as I see fit. / It’s high time I razed the walls that I’ve / constructed.