For many whose lives center around the tiny city of Starkville, it’s easy to forget there’s a bigger world out there. Bigger than Starkville, bigger than Jackson, bigger even than the great state of Mississippi.
Of course, this isn’t news to anyone, so why does it merit mentioning? It needs to be mentioned; in fact, it should be beaten into the heads of some people because every day I observe people who seem to be under the impression that Starkville is as big as the world gets, and this mindset has some negative consequences.
How is this evident? To draw from Jason Browne’s article last Friday about how materialism cloaks our insecurities, clothing oneself in the latest trends or the most expensive brands seems to give many the false feeling that they are somehow superior to others.
I can see it in the way some girls carry themselves. I despise the notion that trendy clothes are better because they’re new and popular. A pair of swishy, ballooning gauchos and a necklace of beads the size of golf balls doesn’t give one the authority to judge, nor does a Louis Vuitton purse or a North Face fleece.
Not to say everyone who follows trends has superiority issues, and not to say I’m oblivious to trends or completely exempt-I certainly embrace some trends myself, but not in an attempt to look a certain part.
College is such a miniscule world, not at all a good example of what the real world holds in store for us. Not just in Starkville, but at any college. It’s so easy to delude oneself into feeling that he or she is in a position to judge when they’re only circulating among the same few hundred people every day, between classes, work, home and around friends.
In a city like Starkville, it’s even easier. As Danny DeVito’s character Amos Calloway said in “Big Fish,” “You were a big fish in a small pond, but this here is the ocean and you’re drownin’.” The thought that we could drown when tossed from cozy little MSU into the real world is laughable now, at a time in our lives when we feel we own our surroundings.
Starkville presents such a small sampling of the population and, though diverse in some aspects, isn’t terribly more diverse than any public high school in the South. Coming to MSU is little more than graduating from a socially stratified system of materialism and popularity into a larger socially stratified system of the same. The groups may not be as exclusive, but the judging eyes are still there.
College is a very selfish time of life. This isn’t all a bad thing. It’s our last hoorah of youth. It’s fine to embrace that, but also absolutely necessary to keep in mind that the world outside of our selfish bubble is much bigger, even more judgmental, and much less forgiving. Just because you feel at the top of the social totem pole in college is no reason to get so bigheaded as to feel that you will be at the top after leaving Starkville or Mississippi, if you plan on leaving at all.
Beyond the clothes and trends, beyond the bar scene that comprises the entire social scene of Starkville, beyond the petty politics which seem so big to us but in reality are so small, there is a far broader population, and keeping that in mind and staying a little humbled when going about our daily lives would be beneficial to our peers, ourselves and our futures.