Staff Box by Geoff Mulvihill

Make a friend; talk to a stranger

The first person I talked to when I arrived on campus last weekend was someone I'd never seen before.

Right on the sidewalk in front of where I parked my car, she said "hello," while I stretched out my road-weary legs. As the stranger, whose face I can't recall, walked away, Oberlin seemed to be a pleasant place to return to. That's the story of the beginning of the year and the influx of new students, as my greeter presumably was. Unfortunately, Oberlin after September is usually not a place where passing strangers exchange hellos or make eye contact.

Those smiling-if-timid newcomers don't take long to start acting like the people around them, for better or worse. In many ways, at Oberlin, change is for the better. Quickly, we gain intense political consciousness and think in new ways.

Through organized events like the Cornel West lecture this week and unorganized events like all-night bonding sessions in lounges, new Obies have probably already stretched their minds and wrestled with new and complex ideas. I hope that stretching and wrestling isn't at the expense of a basic level of compassion for humanity, but I fear it could be.

There are certainly exceptions, but as a whole, we're guilty of not exercising an appreciation for all the people we casually encounter every day. We do not thank the dining hall validine checkers. We do not hold doors open for people. We do not wish good mornings to our residence hall custodians. We do not share kind glances with the people we pass on the sidewalk. We do not wave to our off-campus neighbors the way people in small Midwestern towns should.

Anachronistic and simplistic as it may seem, there is a link between Oberlin's discourteousness and its more profound, more discussed dilemmas.

When things go wrong, we tend to blame others rather than build real coalitions that can create real solutions or the lasting dialogues we say we want to create. Part of the reason we aren't so good at talking to each other, particularly over racial, religious and ethnic lines and on serious topics is that we forget about courtesy. We say big words and we say them passionately, but we don't relate all that well to one another as humans with communality in mind.

Last year, student life at Oberlin was clouded by brief-but-intense discussions about violence against women, advertising for campus events that contained images and terms widely considered racist and a speech by All-African Peoples' Party organizer Kwame Ture that was widely considered anti-Semitic. Each of those issues divided some members of campus who should have come together.

Finding communality doesn't require sharing deep pains. It can take as little as a nod or a hello to a stranger who looks a lot or not at all like you do. We can do those things painlessly. And they'll help us communicate better when there is pain.

Saying "please" and "thank you" isn't likely to resolve the conflict in the Middle East or alleviate racial tensions or sexism or homophobia in this country. But it is likely to help us listen better to people we know as human beings rather than as people we walk past with our eyes pointed at our feet.

To understand one another as well as we at Oberlin say we aspire to understand one another, we need to do something that someone who probably hadn't yet taken an Oberlin class reminded me, someone who's taken three years of them. That is: It's good to talk to strangers.