It’s been several weeks since Big Al has rapped at ya’ll. He’s been busy making incremental improvements to www.whipworm.com, fighting off Spring Quarter apathy, and of course, being a CIS major, he’s been incessantly surfing the web. As many of you know, the web isn’t, despite the recent reports, just for cyber-sex any more. It’s a great way to keep in touch with your family and friends. With scanners and digital cameras, you can now put photographs onto your computer and then through some arcane magic, you can upload them to the Internet. That way your loved ones can see what you’ve been up to and how much little Timmy has grown. Now these photo galleries, as they’re often called, are accessible to everyone on the Internet, though to look at them seems almost like voyeurism. Technically anybody, from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to Mtumbo in Rhodesia to Qi-Feng in Shanghai can see these pictures. But that’s only a technicality. And it’s against the rules of the Net. Thou shalt not view strangers photo galleries! (Gen. 4:25) But you must realize, Big Al’s a rebel. He doesn’t obey these rules. It might be his abysmally low self-esteem or a way to escape the tedium of weary hours. But in any case, he’s spent hours and hours surfing the Net looking at the photographs that strangers put on the web. Somehow it fascinates him. It fills him with a strange sense of fear. We’re all aware at some level that there are many, many people out there. There are more than 250 million people in the United States alone. There are more than 6 billion people on the planet. And as some of psychology students know, you can only have relationships with about 100 people at a time. To put it another way, almost everybody is a stranger to almost everybody else. And do you really care about what happens to strangers? Do you really care about the individual personalities that make up that of the populace? In a very real sense, they don’t matter to you one bit. You don’t really care if these individuals live or if they die. You don’t care, and might prefer not to know, what their favorite color is or whether they find midgets strangely erotic. And this is where the disturbing part comes in. When you look at the images of these people, they suddenly stop being just numbers. Instantly, they become human beings. Human beings that have good times, smile, and proudly hold up their pink little offspring. Human beings who slavishly make electronic shrines to their girlfriends. Human beings who thought it worthwhile to put these pictures up for the world to see. And for an instant you almost care about them. You can almost relate to these people. It’s a very enlightening experience that we suggest all of you ought to try. But then, the realization sets in: There are thousands of millions of people out there, just like these. Thousands of millions of human beings who equally deserve compassion and empathy. And you know you can’t do that. You know you can’t possibly care about all of those strangers. The more picture galleries you look at, the more a peculiar thought grows. That is, the feeling that among those billions, it’s very, very hard to be special. Just look at some pictures of children. Are they really any different from the photos you cherish from childhood? Not really. There are the stock photos of the kid in the bath with a hat made of bubbles. There is the picture of the kid in the chair reading a book. All these experiences are hideously commonplace, but to the person involved, they are magical and unique. As you keep searching, you’ll find the same themes repeated over and over again in endless succession. Each time, the faces might be different, or the background a different color. But the overriding theme remains constant. By now, the roots of your education are soundly shaken. Ever since preschool, teachers have been telling you how special you are. It’s almost become a mantra and an axiom. But it’s resoundingly incorrect. All of which brings us to the crux of the issue. How can human beings be both worthy of compassion and be completely un-unique? In the end, you must realize that you are not separated in any way from the masses. You’re just any other stranger, another statistic to just about everybody else in the entire world. If you’re interesting in following Big Al in this spiritual journey, try starting with these web pages: – www.angelfire.com/co/Troyrock/family.html. – pangea.stanford.edu/~dicarlo/baby/gd_visit/jvisit.html. – greenfield.fortunecity.com/meadow/333/family.pictures.html.
Harmon K. is a senior zoology/ history major. Big Al is a fashion scientist. The brothers are from Upper Arlington.