A Choice

On Saturday, December 15th, 2007, I was bitten by a radioactive spider, which granted me super-powers. Well, that's if "was bitten by" is a figure of speech that means "received", "a radioactive spider" is construed as "an email", and "super-powers" is interpreted as "admission to Stanford University.” I can't allow utmost linguistic precision to undermine a potentially illuminating metaphor, so bear with me.

The point is, I really did receive an important blessing that evening, even if it didn't take the form of my most enduring wish of waking up one day as a super-hero. I was given the opportunity to undertake a journey to the western sea to live with other passionate, dedicated and intelligent people, to receive lessons from legends and masters of their crafts, and to find out what it was that I really wanted to do with all of the gifts that I had been given in life. It is only now that I realize that my wish was granted in the first place – all of those things that I just mentioned were a part of Bruce Wayne’s development into Batman and Scott Summers, Jean Grey, and Hank McCoy transition from awkward teenagers to full-fledged X-Men. Stanford had given me the chance to inhabit the narrative that I had treasured from the time that I had first read X-Men #1 as a kid.

Through all of this, I was continuously provided with occasions to find out what I wanted to prioritize in my life. There was a tantalizing spread of possibilities, from rising to positions of power and prestige, to accruing great wealth, or maybe heading out for one globetrotting adventurer after another. Even as I considered these options, or some combination of all of them, there was one thought that remained unobtrusively planted on the edge of conscious thought. It hummed softly but insistently during each phase of the process of deciding the direction of my life. It was a line from Amazing Fantasy #15 from August of 1962, often incorrectly attributed to Ben Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This text-box exhortation hung over a devastated Peter Parker when he realized that his own unwillingness to act selflessly had resulted indirectly in the death of his beloved Uncle Ben. He would carry the accompanying load of guilt with him for the rest of his life. It would be the spur that would push him to his limits in a never-ending pursuit of a just world, a world where the good guys won and the bad guys lost and the happy music during the credits didn’t ring phony.

Peter Parker’s burden of responsibility is ours too, if we are courageous enough to accept it. For us, it is not guilt that calls us to this challenge, but rather an empowering sense of possibility. We have been given a great boon of smarts, talent, and support, both through the luck of genetics, location, and time as well as through our own and our family’s hard work. Stanford presents us with a choice: will we choose to use our great power to bring about positive change for this world, our world? Will we have the guts and the grit to confront seemingly insurmountable foes like climate change, xenophobia, and war? Will we be able to balance the clear success permitted by the pursuit of individual goals with the perhaps less immediately gratifying task of creating a fair and compassionate society, inch by inch? I won’t pretend to know the answer for every person, or even for myself, but I will say this: when the credits roll, we don’t get a second chance.

The Suspect is Outstanding

(Note - This is one of the entries that I submitted as a portion of my application to be a columnist with the Stanford Daily during Autumn Quarter 2010.)

Crime is an exciting subject - to read about, to watch in movies, to perpetrate in video games. From Capone to Gordon Gekko, the Joker to Bernie Madoff, we as a society make a point of paradoxically reviling the perpetrators of horrible crimes while sometimes finding ourselves admiring the sheer gall of their “achievements”.

A serial manifestation of this mixed disgust and fascination is the “Police Blotter”, a compilation published in the Stanford Daily and based upon reports provided by the Stanford Department for Public Safety. This section details three weeks’ worth of assorted rule-breaking, misdemeanors, and felonies. While the purpose of this publication is primarily to keep the Stanford populace informed about criminal activity on campus, I often find myself reading it not out of any desire to protect myself but rather out of need for some shallow voyeuristic intrigue and some useless statistics. It’s easier than reading an IR paper and a better stall tactic than refreshing my Webmail account (again). There’s something about the contrast between the extremely detailed reporting of the time, location, and nature of the dirty deeds in question with the extremely vague descriptions of the (anonymous) persons involved. No motivations, no complications, no judgments. Just the facts.

Just to spice things up, the writer of the August 12th edition of this feature goes so far as to (inadvertently) praise a wrongdoer: “At 2 a.m., a suspect used a fire extinguisher in the hallway of Branner Hall. The suspect fled on foot and is outstanding.” Even though this complement is the result of a grammatical error rather than honest appreciation of fire-extinguisher use, it’s nice to finally hear some passionate character assessment in our otherwise clinically dry crime pages.