Four Years, Ten Days, €7.50 and Some Turkish Delight

As a recovering pack-rat, I still have every issue of Chips since my freshman year. I decided to look back at the first issue (September 20, 2001) to gauge how things have changed.

My horoscope from that week read, “Escaping a kidnapping from Mongolian refugees will cost you a t-shirt signed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor and 5 Euros.” Actually, it took €7.50 and some Turkish Delight, but who’s counting?

The class of 2005 was welcomed to campus four years ago with network failures, bomb threats, racial violence, and September 11th. It doesn’t get much better than that…

I’ve spent my time at Luther coming to terms with a world that can make September 11th the defining moment of our lives, while genocide in Rwanda and Darfur can go unnoticed. Are Americans terminally self-righteous? Or can we actually affect some change on this heartless world? I still don’t know.

By the time the article is waiting for you outside the Caf on Thursday, we seniors will have only 10 days left until graduation. Not much time to figure it out…

Many of us do not know where life will take us. The so-called “Real World” is still the scary frontier of existence that we cannot yet fully imagine. This Real World is the one that allows extreme poverty and AIDS to run rampant across most of the polluted Earth. This Real World is the one that pays women 75 cents to the dollar. This Real World is the one that refuses to recognize loving relationships between two people just because they have the same sex.

That certainly doesn’t sound like a place I want to go in 10 days…

But when it really comes down to it, aren’t we already there? The arbitrary lines designating the Real World are only in our minds. Luther is part of that world. We’ve known it all along; we just didn’t want to admit it. We felt somehow safer thinking rather that we were in some protective “Luther bubble.”

10 days…

We’re all going to have difficult choices and incredible opportunities—and I’m not just talking about seniors. As citizens of the Real World, we all have a duty to make it better for those less fortunate than ourselves.

Marshall McLuhan wrote, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” The Real World is what we make it. But we can only change it when we realize we’re part of it, so don’t wait till after you graduate. You can do a lot right here at Luther. I’m not going to spell it out for you, but raise your voice and take a stand.

This issue of Chips completes my collection. All the memory-filled pages in-between are but a part of the stories we lived these four years, and I will never forget the people who lived them with me. We will each go our separate ways and make wonderful new stories with other amazing people, but we’ll always have these 87 issues of Chips to remind us that sometimes the past is but a prelude to a better world.