Our Dysfunctional Haverworld Essay -- Personal Narrative Descriptive P

Our Dysfunctional Haverworld As we seniors graduate and head out into the world, one of the things I bet most of us will seek is community. This seems to be one of the requirements for a sustainable society: one that is adaptive according to small, diverse regions, so that local conditions are met with appropriate technologies, and one that functions with a strong ethic based on social ties. In my future I want to feel I am included in and contributing to a supportive, caring and ethical community, whose values of sustainability determine our relationship to nature. I have not found this at Haverford College, as a collective society and an institution. (I hope you all can relate to this from Swarthmore as well. I doubt the two are really very different.) In fact, Haverford has helped me define what I do not want to be a part of--a large corporation that deals in the currency of its own prestige as well as its funding, concentrated only on maximizing the profits of this kind, rather than valuing the equity and ju stice that we have agreed should overrule economic decisions. Al Gore's comparison of US society to a dysfunctional family translates perfectly to the society at Haverford. This helps to explain the lack of ethics concerning justice and sustainability, and suggests that there is hope to resolve these problems. At Haverford and Swarthmore we embody the Cartesian model developed in the scientific revolution that focuses on the separation between humans and nature, mind and body. Our colleges contain an extreme version of what Gore calls "the disembodied intellect"(524) in which we value our abstract academic thoughts above all else, as we "encourage the fullest expression of thought while simultaneously stifling the e... ...ion of forest. We are committed to overconsumption in our extravagant use of paper, purchases of products to decorate our rooms and clean ourselves, and waste of food in the large cafeteria. I notice that most of us in this class have removed ourselves from these aspects of college culture as much as possible, to shield ourselves from it. I personally shield myself by trying to limit my interactions to those with my close friends, with whom my relationships are much less dysfunctional. I hope you all will relate in some form to my analysis, and I hope as a class we can carry this further. In pinpointing the aspects of liberal arts college life that lack the ethics that are desirable and necessary to build sustainable communities, I hope we will dare to envision in detail the situation that would make us feel fulfilled and at peace with ourselves and our environment. Our Dysfunctional Haverworld Essay -- Personal Narrative Descriptive P Our Dysfunctional Haverworld As we seniors graduate and head out into the world, one of the things I bet most of us will seek is community. This seems to be one of the requirements for a sustainable society: one that is adaptive according to small, diverse regions, so that local conditions are met with appropriate technologies, and one that functions with a strong ethic based on social ties. In my future I want to feel I am included in and contributing to a supportive, caring and ethical community, whose values of sustainability determine our relationship to nature. I have not found this at Haverford College, as a collective society and an institution. (I hope you all can relate to this from Swarthmore as well. I doubt the two are really very different.) In fact, Haverford has helped me define what I do not want to be a part of--a large corporation that deals in the currency of its own prestige as well as its funding, concentrated only on maximizing the profits of this kind, rather than valuing the equity and ju stice that we have agreed should overrule economic decisions. Al Gore's comparison of US society to a dysfunctional family translates perfectly to the society at Haverford. This helps to explain the lack of ethics concerning justice and sustainability, and suggests that there is hope to resolve these problems. At Haverford and Swarthmore we embody the Cartesian model developed in the scientific revolution that focuses on the separation between humans and nature, mind and body. Our colleges contain an extreme version of what Gore calls "the disembodied intellect"(524) in which we value our abstract academic thoughts above all else, as we "encourage the fullest expression of thought while simultaneously stifling the e... ...ion of forest. We are committed to overconsumption in our extravagant use of paper, purchases of products to decorate our rooms and clean ourselves, and waste of food in the large cafeteria. I notice that most of us in this class have removed ourselves from these aspects of college culture as much as possible, to shield ourselves from it. I personally shield myself by trying to limit my interactions to those with my close friends, with whom my relationships are much less dysfunctional. I hope you all will relate in some form to my analysis, and I hope as a class we can carry this further. In pinpointing the aspects of liberal arts college life that lack the ethics that are desirable and necessary to build sustainable communities, I hope we will dare to envision in detail the situation that would make us feel fulfilled and at peace with ourselves and our environment.