Rotation in Paradise

So I finally read the really fun article in The New Yorker about students acting freaky at Oberlin. The article reminded me of how back in 1990, I was going on an exchange trip to Great Britain with a bunch of kids from the families of Soviet apparatchiks. I got invited because I actually spoke English, and it would have been weird to bring an entire group of students from a specialized English-language school without a single person who could at least say, “Hi, how are you?”

“I can’t believe we are going to Great Britain!” I exclaimed once we got on a train that was to take us to Moscow.

“I know!” a student sitting next to me responded. “Such a drag! I can’t believe my Dad is sending me to stupid England again. I told him a hundred times that I’m sick and tired of it.”

The girl was completely sincere, and her pain was real. She was from a class of people who traveled the world frequently and with ease, and my excitement of a regular Soviet child who saw little difference, in terms of their sheer improbability, between a trip to London and a trip to the Moon was alien to her.

Oberlin students, too, are, as they claim, in actual pain. A human being can’t exist without something to fight for, something to want, something to overcome. People begin to invent suffering when there is none in order to retain their full humanity. 

One of the students in the article did find an answer to the problem of her incurable melancholy of opulence:

She wanted to get as far away from the United States as she could. “Working my piece of land somewhere and living autonomously—that’s the dream,” she said. “Just getting the eff out of America. It’s a sinking ship.”

This, I believe, is a great solution. Maybe there should be a rotation of sorts. Those who are tired of paradise should go away and give their space up for those who haven’t had an opportunity of getting bored with problem-free opulence. 

The daughter of the Communist Party apparatchik who hated having to go to England again died a long time ago. She got into heavy drugs back in high school and did not live to see her 25th birthday.