By contributing writer Mike McGoldrick
As many PIC readers know, we, the college and university students of the world, are the smartest and most underrated people on the face of the Earth. We are above the likes of the veteran doctors, the international bankers, and the business people. We are superior in almost every way, save for the occasional inability to burp after chugging a 16 ounce beer during a game of beer pyramid. However, we are the most overlooked and underrated group of people on the face of the planet. Why? Because the adult population fears us.
They are content spreading lies about our generation and our bong hits, our binge drinking, our reckless behavior, and our all-night parties. The truth to them is like a spoon scooping out their middle-aged hearts: given proper motivation, we can do anything. I mean it, ANYTHING. We could take over the world if we wanted to. But the fact is we don't. We as a collective whole are perfectly happy where we are and are only motivated by selfish circumstance or “the perfect opportunity.”
So, without further adieu, I present to you my arguments to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we students deserve our cake and could eat it, too…if we weren't sleeping or knew how to bake it.
We are ruthless:
It's true. Men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 are the most ruthless, unscrupulous, conniving, underhanded sons of bitches on the planet. When our twisted little minds hatch a plan, someone always goes down. The reason for this is because we don't care. We've lost that precious link that connects us to the rest of society. Instead, we think only of ourselves (maybe our significant other, so they don't cut us off), and usually don't even ponder the consequences of our actions until they've already happened. It's a factor of our jaded and cynical personalities. In fact, if you browse through PIC, you'll find unquestionable proof of this behavior in my fellow peers (I refuse to name casual misanthropic names…)
We have lots of spare time:
Despite what most of the world thinks, college and university students aren't quite as busy as it seems. Sure, with 20+ hours of class, a job, and probably some hobby other than ingesting various poisons into the body, some are led to believe we have no spare time. The truth is, we have quite a bit. Our generation has the attention span of a gerbil, so any activity we do only keeps our twisted little minds occupied for about twelve minutes. After that, we begin to doodle, whistle, eat, nap, and then plot. Even at our part time jobs we have the time to scribble down notes and ideas for later. Think all those books you see students reading are for class or, perish the thought, pleasure? Don't be so fucking naive! We read Oscar Wilde to learn cynicism, Dostoyevsky to learn cunning, Dickens to learn language skills, and Moore to learn criticism (boo-yah!).
We really, really don't care:
I know I mentioned this before, but I feel I need to reiterate. If committing X felony will disrupt the life of Y, and we happen to be C, then we don't give two shits unless committing X takes a lot of effort.
We have all the resources:
The libraries, the documents, the papers, the reports, all the raw information available at our fingertips. We have anything and everything we need knowledge-wise in case it becomes pertinent information. Thought the old Jolly Rogers Cookbook was bad? Guess what engineering students can build…
We aren't alone:
Once you hit any college or university campus, you are instantly made aware of the large number of similar interest groups around you. A freshman with an itch to bring down Wall Street can easily find an Anarchist hacker who'll do it for a case of free beer. Furthermore, we occasionally band together like worker ants well past 5am in some secluded area of the campus. If you combined one student from every major faculty on campus, and put them in a room with one project to do…whoa, nelly. Each male would fight for a chance to mate with the queen and then abandon the larvae. But enough about ant colonies.
We are everywhere:
It boggles the mind to think of how many students there are as I have mentioned in the world. I'd give you a number but I don't want to bring up Internet Explorer. Think about it.
We are well-educated:
After a few years of post-secondary education, we pick up a few things. Things like how to learn massive amounts of information in less than an hour, how to write a flawless paper on 45 minutes of combined sleep, or how to prove that particles of light energy behave similarly to the waves emitted by sounds. I mean, it's common freakin' knowledge, people. We're like little scientists on crack with nothing much to do except work part time jobs to pay off our loans.
We can be quickly motivated:
It's true. Although we are lazy piles of shit most of the time (some not so much), given a challenge we almost always step up. I think every single campus in North America has had something like this happen: your school residence network has a bandwidth limit for student accounts, which, naturally, does not appease the computer engineering students who love their online gaming and 100GB+ servers of anime. What do they do? They make more bandwidth, they create admin accounts, whatever. These guys know exactly what they're doing. In fact, they even know that eventually it'll crash the network. But they do it anyways. Why? Because they can.
We are all well-rounded people:
I shit you not, my dumbfounded friend. Just about every student is good at more than one thing. The accounting student may be a whiz in the metal shop, and the law student may be a government-trained sharpshooter, too. We're like two or three little people all rolled into one, angst-filled person.
Okay, now that I re-read the drivel I just wrote, I realize I should change the title. But I won't. Why the fudge not, you ask? Simple, because I am so smart I left that title there on purpose to lull the older folk into reading this article. By now, they're so goddamned paranoid about students lurking around them that I bet they've soiled their khaki pressed pants. And that is the greatest gift we possess: we can fuck with your miiiiinnnnnds.
*This article went down a slippery slope. From genuine interest to American-style, orange-colored paranoia. But doesn't that make it all the more interesting to read?