Eulalia Engel – The Buccaneer

Dear Peninsula College Buccaneer Editor,

I am writing in response to the editorial written in the November issue of the PC Buccaneer [“Pardon me but your pumpkins are showing. How the ASC Halloweenied out on its dress code.”]

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that trying to enforce a dress code at a Halloween dance, whose target audience is the mainstream college student, is silly and hypocritical.

I could see where you could make that assumption, but it was enacted in hopes that we could steer our beloved students away from unwanted sexual encounters and social discrimination.

Sure, we’re only treating a symptom of a corrosive disease, but what else is there to do?

We cannot “unteach” our peers. We thought about assembling a protest outside the dance, holding signs that read:

“Do not glorify the exploitation of your sexual impulses, value human relationships over money, and stop trying to escape the bizarre nature of this world by chemically inducing yourselves into a mental state that most closely resembles floating around in your mothers womb!”

But we came to the consensus that protesting only makes us look like crazy liberal hippies and does not really change anything.

So, the Associated Student Council just did things the old fashioned way, the way our forefathers and foremothers did before us…we waged war with Halloween’s newly adopted code of conduct by enforcing a dress code.

You see, Editor, we saw no other way to challenge the underlying notions of oppression behind the plethora of degrading costumes.

The generation before us did not ask, “What must we change in our world so that our children do not have endure the hardships we have faced?”

Instead they phrased the question, “How do we control the world, so that we get immediate results, and then leave it up to future generations to overcome even larger hardships?”

Humanity is an evolutionary masterpiece that survived through the epochs because of our exceptional mimicry skills. When our forebears decided to phrase the big question this way, my generation’s destiny was entangled by it.

What do you expect? How are we to say no to control when we grew up listening to the banter about the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on Rock and Roll, the assorted wars on terrorism, the war on education, the battle of the sexes, apartheids, culture jams, religious jihads, gang wars, wars on words, police brutality, wars on ideas, war on the environment, and Warhammer 40k.

Skateboarding is crime, musicians are domestic terrorist, potheads are felons, and creativity has been changed to ADD.

Students protesting in Mexico are being massacred, and peaceful protests in the US are overshadowed by provocateurs looting. Virtuous individuals are transformed to effigies of meaning lost whose likeness is mass printed on t-shirts and sold in shopping malls.

So does it come to any surprise that after all this war, here we stand, half-naked, staring into flashing lights, our minds fully gentrified, and the sound of synthesized music blaring through the speakers?

We did everything we were suppose to. We bought the ideas sold to us.

The young woman that shows up to a party dressed as an adult film actress is not doing this because “she just wants attention” nor because “she does not know any better.”
She is doing it because she is mirroring the messages that have systematically embedded themselves in her consciousness.

She was, after all, given a Barbie Doll for Christmas instead of a paint set.

The young man who quantifies sex, allowing himself to be swept up in the numbers game, his manhood measured not by his action, but by the number of notches on his belt. Is it any wonder that he was given a BB gun on his birthday instead of a George Orwell novel?

The ASC had the best of intentions when it established a dress code for the Halloween Dance.

Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that control cannot impart knowledge, experience, or meaning. One must find that on their own.