It has been a tacit rule of mine that, should a friendly dinner end without some poor soul riled up, it has been a failed meal.
Such is the nature of my dining tradition. Among the peers with whom I nightly feast, there has emerged a veritable trend of dinners degenerating into debates.
To be sure, our antagonisms break every rule my mother taught me about eating at a table. Our quarrels are nothing short of conversations. Though we may venture into politics and religion, two subjects mothers love, our discourse is hardly small talk.
Manners dictate that we subdue, if not refrain altogether from, argument, as though the issues that matter most are to be left alone.
Yet there is no reason for important issues to be ignored because they divide, and I write not only with regards to supper parleys, but to one’s commingling with all who surround her in this brave new world of university.
For if manners shape our associations, does that not mean that our relationships are tempered by a pretense of politeness? And here I was, under the impression that sincerity mattered more than mere courtesy. Should you ignore ideological rivals, or embrace them by ignoring contradiction, you risk a valuable discourse and the integrity of a friendship, respectively.
For there is one particular theme that stands out in the mythological make-up of this campus: diversity, especially that of opinion.
The respect thereof has served as a euphemism for sterilizing viewpoints, for compartmentalizing opinion as a facet of a person to be studied, protected and left alone. This plurality of perspectives has been squandered and compromised ““ dialogue has barely a semblance of substance beyond an exchange of more or less differing statements, followed by a mutual shrug of “to each his own.”
But beliefs are not meant to be kept in glass jars, insulated, examined and kept safe and untouched. Opinions are not, like Lady Gaga or meatloaf, to be excused on grounds of subjective taste. Personal beliefs are, like any claim, subject to criticism, no matter the mandates of manners from this culture of correctness.
It would be a lie were I to say this campus does a bad job of letting students voice their grievances. The gratuitous factionalism and importunate activism emblematic of last year’s student government election and fee hike protests prove otherwise.
That was, however, mostly theatrics. In everyday parlance, students have a terrible proclivity for sticking with their ilk, and birds of a feather hardly make for interesting conversation. And when the opposite-minded do in fact interact outside a classroom or debate forum, it is often little more than innocuous banter, a relationship founded on drivel. So if there is any wisdom I wish to impart upon you, dear reader, it is that you ought not be afraid to personally engage those with whom you disagree, nor should you pretend your contradictions don’t exist.
I must confess that I initially hesitated to become the provocateur I am today. I entered university with the false impression that everyone, like yours truly, had denounced God and country, read “The Brothers Karamazov” at age 5, and accepted libertinism as a way of life. I was wrong. Fortune placed this humble heretic in a bed no more than five feet away from one who believed my soul was damned to brimstone, on a floor with residents who thought the then-soon-to-be President a socialist.
It is admittedly difficult to step on the toes of new-found friends.
It is also infinitely rewarding.
Among my fondest memories are the thousand-and-one nights of friendly rhubarb, where in verbal acrobatics wedded to hormones and booze made disputants of comrades and sophists of schoolmates. Those were the nights of blasphemy, of apologetic, of political powwow and philosophical prattle ““ of everything good and worthwhile to discuss. Discord was the glue that kept discourse meaningful.
So have at it; let your disagreements be known and let the chips fall where they may. Why risk alienating a once or future friend?
Well, it is honest, rather than a farce, and more importantly, it is good fun.