The University of Richmond Collegian 4/14/94

Staff Editorial

by Jeffrey Carl, Opinion Editor

What We Think

an Opinion from the Collegian Staff

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”

You now have before you the final issue of The Collegian for the 1993-4 academic year. At this point in the year, it’s customary to look back and ask ourselves, “What have we learned?”

Well, not much, really. It seems like it was a busy year in the “Real World” looming menacingly outside. Car-bombings. Beavis-blamings. Penis-slicings. Skater-whackings.

And yet, while we try to draw some grand philosophical conclusions from this year that has passed us by, we find ourselves groping for a moral to the story. Maybe the moral to the story is that there really isn’t one.

It may very well be that the salient feature of the last academic year was just how vacuous it was, and how little anything really changed. The rotation of the Earth, the law of gravity, Murphy’s Law and the coordinate housing system; all these things seem to be quite the same as they ever were. It may be that all the supposed toiling we have been doing for the last year has indeed been in vain, tedious drawings in the sand to be carried away by next year’s tides. Maybe this year really just didn’t mean anything. Maybe everything we have said and done this year will be forgotten next year, all of our plans and ideas consigned to some kind of cosmic dead letter office of dreams that faded away.

It’s easy to look back at the last year – or the last four years – and ask, where has it all gone? Have I done anything worthwhile, or have I done anything to justify my existence? Maybe all that time, all those memories – maybe it’s all just gone, with no more to say about it than that.

And then again maybe not. Maybe ... just maybe this year has gone silently to shaping us into what we’re meant to be. Maybe something or a lot of things this year have changed us for the better, have made us stronger, or have given us something to look forward to. Maybe we aren’t rich and famous ... yet. It doesn’t matter. If we’ve done just one thing to make us who we are, or to get us where we’re going, then it has all been worth it.

Maybe this doesn’t make much sense. But to some of us, when we wonder what it’s all about or if we’re ever going to really change a world that seems so gone wrong, we kick back beneath a shady tree on Boatwright Beach and feel the warmth of the sun and watch the world go by and think that maybe – just maybe – our time hasn’t been wasted and that in our tiny corner of the world, all is right with the world. Good luck, everybody.