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