We need to analyze what we are doing
Monday, June 15, 1998
We need to analyze what we are doing
What is striking about Los Angeles, after a period away, is how well it works. The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work, the beaches work." - Joan Didion
I am not proud of several of my circumstances. For one, I live in a city dedicated to making movies, launching the first myths created solely for commercial purposes. The ethics of my culture can be summed up in that incisive car tag: "I got mine at Buerge jeep." The French believe that UCLA is not an university, but a brand of clothing. So this is how we have chosen to spend our privilege.
My response has been to exalt my chosen quasi-profession, journalism, as the moral response to worldly madness. But in the still moments, I wonder how I can continue to diagnose society's ailments without trying to cure them.
It is a recent philosophical component of "Western civilization," this belief that our lives are blessed with meaning through our occupations. The existentialists ended up loading vocation with so much meaning only after they gave up all other faiths. Like most others at UCLA, I am so incredibly busy accomplishing that I rarely have a chance to inspect the underlying forces.
I find the world we have created for ourselves intolerable. UCLA may be one of the shiniest places on earth, a Disneyland college with perfectly manicured lawns, but it has none of the ideological ferment, personal chaos or human electricity that a public university should have. Do you know the No. 1 complaint of UCLA students? Loneliness.
When Saint Joan pointed out the eerie functionality of Los Angeles, she forgot to include its hustling, alienated, hormonal, emotionally comatose young elite. We "work" too, as inevitably and single-mindedly as the freeways, to fulfill our ascendant place in society. We're a part of that glossy, wired, antiseptically "diverse" future, but we are missing something very crucial. Our ideals of achievement and empowerment have been co-opted by Nike for shoe ads. Our sense of community has atrophied from disuse. Our psychological support systems have collapsed so much that we now pay for people to listen to our problems. Maybe the middle-class dream isn't so blissful after all. Especially when it's a thin skin covering the mass of poverty, despair and violence that Los Angeles actually is.
Of course, I too have fallen in with the chase. This summer, I'm leaving my friends, my home and the man I love for a great professional opportunity in another state, and I regret this decision. I regret our collective anomie and drift. I regret my consumptive workaholism.
Blame is not mine alone. We are products of our culture. But we must take advantage of our position at the American pinnacle, and be producers as well. The emptiness must be filled. For everything we consume, something must be created. Microsoft has it wrong. The question cannot be: Where do you want to go today? We should ask, instead, of ourselves: How do we transform where we are?
Hannah Miller
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