Remember that kid who everyone used to call a tattletale in elementary school?
The kid who would always tell the teacher if he or she caught you chewing gum or not sharing the Slinky even if you’d been waiting for, like, 20 minutes for your turn?
Seriously, what a doo-doo head.
This kid knew the rules and wanted to make sure everybody followed them, a believer in a school-sanctioned system of justice.
Everybody hated that kid, and it was only a matter of time before he pissed off the oversized giant in your class and subsequently got taught the lesson, “Snitches get stitches.”
Turns out he was only following the wrong set of rules.
I was reminded of this for two reasons:
First, the tattletale of my kindergarten class added me on Facebook recently. I was the weird kid in my class who kept to myself — and thankfully never really got picked on for it, probably because I was really weird — but I still knew enough to ostracize the tattletale. That friend request is still sitting in my notifications, and I’m probably not going to approve it.
Second, I’ve either been in or observed a lot of situations as of late that have tested someone’s loyalty, and it’s been making me stress eat like a motherlover.
It’s become such a problem that a co-worker of mine saw me guzzling down a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts alone in my car with “Bad Romance” blasting in the background and felt prompted to ask if I was OK.
I was dressed in my typical paint-stained shirt and pajama bottoms and I-don’t-need-no-man slippers. There was no sugarcoating the situation.
Sadly, that is not the first time something like that has happened to me.
I started to ponder the sorts of situations that got me to this point in the first place. I thought back to my lessons on Derrida and deconstructing the binomial oppositions inherent to Western thought.
An example of this concept is Goldilocks and the Three Bears; Western thought presents the porridge as too hot or too cold, and deconstruction tries to elucidate the many shades of just right.
The concept I constantly grappled with was loyalty.
But the opposition to be faced here wasn’t disloyalty — it was honesty.
I have a tendency to remain loyal to organizations and people who, at one point or another, require me to be dishonest with myself. And I externalize the resulting conflict with food.
It’s like trying to drive a car that won’t start.
The key is in the ignition, and the air conditioning and stereo work just fine, but when you try to start up the car, you’re not able to go where you need to go. I make this analogy because this was the situation I found myself in at the Krispy Kreme parking lot that fateful evening.
Take Watergate, for example.
Quite a few members of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President loved Nixon and supported his ideals, but they knew that quite a few committee activities were wrong. Their loyalty to Nixon became pitted against their desire to be forthcoming about CREEP’s ethics, and quite a few of them chose to remain silent on the issue.
This problem isn’t one that gets easier to handle with age.
Right now, a lot of students are starting to feel loyal to their courses of study, their professors who like them, their extracurriculars, their employers and, soon enough, their spouses.
Figuring out how to balance your loyalties with honesty will only become more of a challenge.
Chip Skambis is a telecommunication senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays. You cant contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
