Weekly Blog #6

People on this campus are angry. I am slightly irritated.

I guess it really isn’t that surprising. I’ve always felt that people’s feelings on this campus are the strongest utility we have. This Bailey Oratorical was a supercharged emotional display of the unsatisfied student body at large. At what? Mostly everything. We are angry about the environment. We are angry at COVID. We are angry about micro and macroaggressions present in our community. Brandie Ray said it best with “where is the accountability?” (that of course referencing the supposed willful ignorance of the healthcare community to overlook the eugenic roots that stem out to all parts of the medical field).

In fact, there were very few bright spots of the entire Bailey — being there in person, it really just felt like a big drag. Not that I’m uncomfortable with people bringing up problems we don’t know how to solve but at the end of most of the speeches, I found myself with more questions than answers:

1. If joy is possible because of pain, then where do you draw the line on the so-called extremes of life?
2. Did we actually solve air pollution? I mean, there wasn’t really any evidence of that…
3. Are the solutions the speakers proposed realistic in any capacity?
4. What about the other part of our global community where anger drives productivity? Where do you draw the line between confronting a problem and burying yourself in work?

As with all Bailey speeches, there were definitely personal anecdotes that tied into each speaker’s topic of choice. However, it felt like five to six of the speakers ended up giving prescriptive descriptions of the issues they were talking about. I’m not sure if it has to do with all of the “filtering” that goes on in the process (if you know anything about the judging system, you know what I’m talking about) but despite separate topics all of the speeches felt similar in tone — except for Rohan, because he really just went off in his own direction.

I personally feel that, at least for this year, the Bailey Oratorical has lost a bit of the insight-providing novelty that I’ve come to expect from it. No fault of the speakers of course, but it was disturbing to not really see any speech that really went against our community ideology. Honestly, I didn’t feel challenged at all this year. I guess part of that makes me wish I had tried out this year, but the other part makes me wonder what the preliminary speeches were. I sincerely wish I could see the 42 other speeches that were cut for whatever reason.

If those speeches didn’t make it to the final because they didn’t conform to some stupid format or if the residual message wasn’t as clear — I don’t give a flying fuck about it. Insight is insight and knowledge is knowledge. If someone has something to say I really have little interest in hearing the filtered down version of passion. I think if anything, the Bailey needs to be modernized — no winners and no prize money. We are changing and shaping our ideas to win; not to share and disperse knowledge in the spirit of scholarly debate.

Did anyone else have a problem with this? Am I crazy? I definitely felt crazy this year and I know at least a few people were worried about participating this year for “the fear of getting cancelled.” How stupid is that? A college has a tradition of free speech that subtly intimidates its participants into either backing out or using euphemisms to say what they truly feel. Help.