Yet another soap box

Today the entirety of my Italian class turned against me.

(Except for Emerson Easley. This might be because she was afraid daily poking would turn into punches.)

This happened because of the following:

The teacher walked in and informed us that one of his other students had been held up at gun point on the red line the night before. And I DARED asked who the student was.

This instigated a whole torrent of "THAT'S PRIVATE!" and "HOW DARE YOU!" and "EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO PRIVACY!" and "YOU'RE SURELY GOING TO HELL FOR WANTING TO KNOW!" Mostly from the two most self-righteous girls in the class who think that talking back to the teacher/giving attitude/being godawful annoying is a witty thing to do in class. Since we had to explain everything in Italian, I didn't express "I've got a point and Lord in Heaven, please shut up" quite as eloquently as I could have. So before I do some more homework tonight, I am going to take the opportunity to blow off some steam.

I grow weary of this culture of anonymity that seems to be quite popular. Everyone's concerned with keeping their business to themselves, which is quite fine. I've got plenty of business that is mine and no one else's, but then I don't go around TELLING people about it. If that person who got mugged wanted that to be his business, then he should not have told anyone about it. Or he should have told my Italian teacher to not share the event. Because as far as I'm concerned, the minute he told someone this happened to him, he made it someone else's business.

And what's wrong with people knowing who he is? I understand that there are crimes out there where the person would not want others to know he was a victim. I GET ALL THIS. But not in the case of muggings, especially in a place where it's more or less becoming commonplace. The perpetrator remains anonymous, and so does the victim. And the more emails I get saying the following:

"Tall white male in his twenties got mugged at such and such a street at such and such a time by a young man in a hoodie."

The less I am going to care. Generalities have a way of doing that. But when a specific student was killed at the beginning of the year and a name was provided, everyone cared a lot more. Granted, that was a very serious crime, but I could look up the name on facebook and see if I had seen this person around, who his friends were, etc. And this isn't being a busy body, this is being part of a community of people, and unfortunately that sometimes means that you need to know names and other people's business, because that's how you can help them. This is especially applicable to colleges, where the school is sort of intent on building an intellectual/friendly/strong community. It's hard to make one when you don't know the names of people in it, especially the names of people to whom bad things happen, because you can't even support them when they need it most. It will sounds something like "The entire student body stands behind this one certain person whose name we won't tell you in this difficult time." Both parties involved remain remarkably anonymous, no? I can basically feel the love.

And when every day Star and the Enquirer are releasing censored pictures of Britney's lady business and information about Angelina Jolie's alleged phone conversations and tiffs and everything else I unfortunately do like to read, and we don't even know our neighbors' names, it all seems rather odd that I can't even know the name of a person who want some help.

This, in short, is why I talk to people and why I talk about people. There is a sign put out in a window of some alternate religious group near my old dorm that says the following:

Small people talk about people, average people talk about things, great people talk about ideas.

I think that is a rather hasty statement. Because it's easy to talk about ideas when you don't know how to relate it back to people. And where in that statement is the part about talking TO people?

Ah. It's nice up here. Time for something else.

And those two girls don't roll their R's nearly as elegantly as Emerson and I do.