Rich girl persuasion
This upcoming Tuesday will mark my eighth week at Southern Methodist University, and I figure that if my family has enough faith in this institution and myself to pay $13,000 some-odd dollars a semester for my being a Mustang, then I am obligated to get as much out of my time here as possible. However, as time goes on, the general student population of SMU agitates me more and more.
Perhaps it is because of the neighborhood. The other day I was at Jamba Juice in Highland Park Village and encountered a very rude little family, a mother with her two daughters. I usually don’t pay much attention to how people look at me, but my friend did and reported to me that the entire family of three gave me dirty looks. Two of them were little girls, which is sad, because they are growing up to be just as hostile as their bitchy mother.
My friend, a Mexicano himself, then said to me that he always thought that people around here acted like that toward him because of race relations, but he realized that those dirty looks just come from a tightly-knit group of people who adamantly disapprove of nonconformity. “The Stepford Wives” was a movie, not a suggestion for a lifestyle!
And, I am a nonconformist — not that I don’t watch popular TV or know anything about pop culture. I’m naturally nocturnal and tend to have more of a night life than morning life, so when I have to get up for school I wait until the last minute to go. And, I don’t always have time to wash my hair, then blow dry and style it, and put just the right makeup on, and all the time-consuming things that go into looking like a Barbie doll.
Last week, I heard a girl in my philosophy class tittering to another classmate about me during the lecture, right in front of me. I am almost run over in the parking garage almost every single day by little boys and girls who don’t give a damn about what is going on around them, because they are the center of the universe and God’s gift to mankind.
Well, I am not impressed, SMU. The overall lack of common courtesy and kindness in the students here is too much. College should be about finding out that maybe the political party your parents belong to really doesn’t know what it is doing, and maybe that every thing your parents told you isn’t true.
Do I have to wear a certain brand and carry a certain purse, or pay to be in a sorority that will give me a sweatshirt to wear so that I match every other tanned skinny girl that subscribes to exactly the same mindset as everyone else around her?
Does anyone here think that maybe learning some of the material in the general education curriculum might actually be useful and is not there just to learn what will be on the test?
Yes, I have always been a bit of an idealist hippie, and my idea of what a college experience should be is not what I have found here. The girls are like vultures here, feeding off the weak and sizing people up to see if they have anything to offer them. If not, then they’re worthless.
Why can’t the female population of SMU see each other not as competition and enemies but as fellow human beings? For that matter, maybe we could even decrease our speed by 30 mph in the parking lot out of consideration for other people, even when we’re in a hurry.
Does the rich upper class have to live up to its lowest standard? No. So don’t.
Last semester at North Lake College, I studied under a very cool and wise history professor. He said that the people of and from humble beginnings, the ones who make their start in the light of adversity, are the ones who have made and will make history and revolutionize the times.
The people who really make an impact aren’t seen coming – they break away from the pack. If the students of SMU just continue to fall in line with one another in cookie-cutter fashion, then nothing great will come from us.
Sara Snyder is a sophomore undecided major. She may be contacted at [email protected].
