May 21, 2003

Phony

Its CPR season, I loathe writing them. The dynamic is simple; cadets are pretty simple. Basically, it's an evaluation of who is in the out-group. They rate who is not their friend, for several reasons. One, you don't want to screw up your friend's grade. Two, you don't want to criticize your friends. Three, by criticizing your friends you are criticizing yourself by proxy. In the end, a person's friends are people that have common interests, common beliefs, common experiences, etc. Close to no one here who has a healthy ego, would be that self-critical. Another reason to resort to this form of distinction is that, for the most part everyone is the same. While at the same time there is also enough difference to not have a common ground (comparing the position CO to security, a DFL FOS to a mech major, etc). In the end it's a bunch of 20 year old wanna-be elitists who are up-until they are forced to submit rating don't care and will not say anything to anyone.

Something I'm taking into consideration when writing lower-half CPRs is whether the person is going to get it or not. This is because one of the people who I would write it on would be the type to retaliate, whether by saying nasty things about me - as if he doesn't already - or writing a bad one back. If I had my way, I would write them on the people who have done nothing but make fun people not in their in-group and promote themselves and the people who managed to completely disappear for at least 3 years, but they are part of the majority and that's a powerful thing.

It's all quite phony, there is such a fine line between playing the game and subtly lying. Maybe I hate people like that from my personal experience. I had to sit through a raving mad rant recently. Basically it went "I hate everyone, you know how hard it is for me to not curse them out and strangle them? I may be smiling all the time but that means jack shit…" and it continues on like that. The funny thing is though, its consistent with what I've observed. What's even funnier is the people who don't see through the act and think this person is such a nice, Christian, future officer. This is what you see when you are quiet and disregard first impressions and majority opinions, you see their performance and the ways they manage their performance.

I have seen so much here that has turned me off to the stereotype of the masses that go here. In this company there are people who other cadets don't want to be around too much because all they do is ridicule other people. I've heard things to a degree of bigotry I never expected to hear for college students. Some say there is a maturity problem here; I would say that the greater problem is that there is a problem with manners here. I've had a person flip me off and proceed to flatulate on purpose. That is not an issue of maturity, because even my five year old cousin knows that is rude. These people are graduating, these people are considered to have demonstrated that they have the potential to be capable officers.

Something else to remember, that's related to this subject. Its like MAJ Burbelo said, "you have to accept that some people just don't like you." It still has an impact though, and it still hurts.