Yuko Tanaka

Everything I decide to make part of my life, I want to be an expert at. I don’t think I ever have an excuse to do anything I say I’m committed to in a half-assed way, although I find myself contriving excuses quite frequently – out of laziness, fear, misdirection, lack of determination, or whatever. This is unfortunate, but isn’t 43things the right place to start making the necessary changes?

I want to be an expert at playing the violin – to master my bowing technique, to be able to combine impeccable technique with musicality.
I want to be an expert on one person – to know the sound of their footsteps, what makes them truly laugh, know their fears, hopes, insecurities, and passions.
I want to be an expert in some field – to be passionately devoted to, say, literature, or transnational corporations, and to be able to connect the subject to what makes us truly human.
I want to be an expert communicator – to be able to speak in a way that moves others, that makes them understand how the trivial things I am talking about make up part of a larger human experience. To communicate that everything is important, and to show them how.

I want to be an expert at everything, really. But so far, these will have to do.

It’s closing, it’s really done, it’s really over – today was graduation, and everyone is going home. I am in a state of disbelief. Antioch is my home. I have grown exponentially since coming here, and Antioch has given me hope for the world in a way that I never knew was possible. There is no college more actively committed to creating a better world than this one, and its closing makes me feel hopeless. I’ve never really felt this sort of grief before; my idealism has never truly failed…

My heart feels like a towel someone’s been wringing for days and weeks and months, and I am losing so much of myself that I wonder if I can truly force out one more drop. I know I can survive it, but this grief – it’s horrible – and unlike the death of a human being, I don’t think it is ultimately alright and within the course of nature. I just have this feeling that for this institution to close down, there has to be something terribly, terribly wrong with the world. And I wonder if there is hope in it being righted.

My home is being dragged out from under my feet. I had a breakdown last night, when I found out that my friend and neighbor had been raped after our last party. We always felt safe on this campus – none of us ever lock our doors, and pretty much anyone could just walk in and take our stuff or kill us in the middle of the night if they wanted to. But we trusted that no one ever wanted to, and no one ever did. But for the first time, there was a rape incident on this campus, and – god, why ever, but why especially now? When every sense of home we have is already being taken from us, why did we have to have another symbol of this happen just when it hurt the most? No one had ever taken the feeling of physical security and safety away from us before, not at Antioch… and now, just as the security of Antioch is being swiped from under us, the security of Home – we get this physical parallel to make this feeling of something being ripped away from us even more real. Just, Jesus fuck, WHY?

I can’t be coherent, I can’t make this writing logical or beautiful. I wish I could, but I feel like all of my resources are just exhausted.

I’m not sure about this goal anymore. I’m not removing it yet because I need to develop my thoughts more thoroughly before I make a real decision, but I have some dissatisfactions with the term “revolution.”

Of course, I have plenty of problems with the world order as it is now. Capitalism has run amok, globalization has given new power to corporations that takes more and more power away from local governments and ultimately, people, and America’s actions show that we believe that having the most money and power through our capitalist hierarchy means we can enforce our cultural values and American systems onto other, “lesser” countries. These are obviously problems, and I want to change them.

But “revolution” suggests overthrowing the current bureaucracy in favor of our own faction, whatever the idealists and revolutionaries of today make it, and that spells opposition. It means two (or more) groups vying for a similar position of power. One may do more “right” things, and one may try to disperse the power to be more “equal,” but governance structures as we think of and interact with them today are inherently flawed. No matter what “correct” party you choose to support, within this structure of government I believe that we will continue history’s cycle of hierarchies being created, then broken down, created, then broken down.

That’s why I have a problem with the term “revolution.” I think if anything, I want a “renaissance” – as we all know, a rebirth. I want to create a new structure, a new system, one that somehow avoids being hierarchical – I don’t know if it’s possible, as part of me thinks it’s part of human nature to create hierarchies. It might even be part of nature itself to create hierarchies, if we include survival. However, I don’t know if human nature and nature-nature’s hierarchies should be defined under the same word, as our version has this whole new realm of the mind, and we assert our hierarchies through the creation of sets of symbols, mindsets, and values… because we have thoughts, consciousness, existential crises, etcetera. But anyway, I worry that hierarchies might be too natural to overcome within our governance structures.

But can we try? What if we learned to interact with other human beings in completely different ways? What if we learned to cooperate with each other, and stop seeing ourselves so individualistically? What if we lived in more local spheres, promoting the creation of our own cultures – and creating systems to understand each other’s, and not try to assert ourselves over each other’s cultures and values?

Well, this isn’t a very well-developed theory, and my Renaissance will have to take a lot more thought to become coherent. And I don’t know how much more time and thought it will take to make it viable. Maybe this is too idealistic – I don’t believe you can change human nature. But I do believe that you can draw out the good in it, and I believe that people are often products of their times – so if people grow up in a time where the popular thing is to try to be good people and good citizens (with a new definition of a good citizen), then there’s hope. Anyway, I don’t think anything is too idealistic, as long as you know how to take the creatively pragmatic steps to reach those dreams.