Stacey Nguyen

I felt as though I was embarking a journey with complete strangers, like we shared something in common that was often overlooked in our rushed daily lives, which we conduct by creating walls of difference rather than bridges of community. For a moment, the anxiety of interacting with strangers was gone.

My cohort is allegedly narcissistic and selfish. Recently, LinkedIn found through a survey that 68 percent of millennials would sacrifice a friendship for a promotion. Ouch. I, too, could feign superiority and look down upon my generation, but that would be disingenuous of me. I don’t think our fears and anxieties are unfounded. The cost of living is higher. More than a quarter of a million college graduates last year had minimum wage jobs. Still, I am hesitant to say that the academy has turned students into immoral, irrational players of commercial interest, as Allan Bloom suggests in “The Closing of the American Mind.” If anything, I am rather uncharacteristically optimistic about the broadening of disciplines and diversity in the modern university, which, though imperfect, opens up the potential for collectivity. And I am rather optimistic about what my generation has to offer.

I segued back into my former omnivore lifestyle with a pescatarian diet. After a few days, I moved past seafood. At first it was easy; I could detach myself from the animal. But then it wasn’t. As silly as it seemed, my meaty meals challenged my moral premise. I often woke up full, more from shame than from the meat itself. If I ate seafood the night before, I spent my mornings considering the water pollution offset by overfishing and farming fish. On a more emotional level, I thought about the fish and their fish lives, drifting in water only to be caught and eaten. I thought about what made me entitled to eating another sentient being. What was it about being human? Did my willpower snap in half under the weight of what others told me was simply natural for me to engage in?

So what happens when activists prioritize branding? They downplay the importance of policy for uncritical, often expensive, gatherings and capitalize on the grandiose rhetoric of “empowerment” and “human rights.”

Now, usually, I would present a single, parable-ish narrative that highlights the existence of the patriarchy. But over the past few years, I’ve found it hard to only talk about one uncomfortable experience because there have been so many.

During the last few weeks, I have been tuned in on NBC’s The Voice, a nationwide singing competition in the form of reality television. The Voice features music coaches Blake Shelton, Shakira, Usher, and Adam Levine.

During my first six weeks at UC Berkeley, I learned about the Zapatistas and their resistance to neoliberalism in Mexico in my Chicano studies class. My immediate reaction was, wait, isn’t liberalism good?

Religion, it seems, is maudlin, restrictive and imposing. We learn it as something to be tolerated, not accepted. Society rarely lifts the veil of paranoid reading on religion, and it also seems that the conversations among different communities of varying degrees and kinds of faith never quite happen.