I went to Lake Wauburg to go kayaking with one of my friends. We rowed around for a good little while, pretending we were pirates, then unsuccessfully attempting to get close enough to a bird to hit it with our paddles. It was pretty enjoyable.
But then I got bored. I wondered, “What would happen if I rock this boat?”
I didn’t actually end up rocking the boat because I didn’t want my buddy to think I was a dumba--, an a--hole or worse: a dumba-- a--hole.
When we got to shore, he asked me what I would have done if he had tipped the boat over. He said he wanted to, just to see what would happen, but decided not to because he was worried what I would think.
So what I want to know is this: What’s wrong with rocking the boat? Maybe we would’ve flipped over and fallen into the water, but who cares? Every unexpected event is a new adventure. Every time the boat flips over and you have to flail around in the water trying to get back right is a story you can tell the next time somebody brings up kayaking.
This just brings me to a few of my pet peeves. First is March Madness commercials. Some of them are good. Some are bad. I don’t care about those. I’m pissed about the ones where the ad company apparently said, “Well, this ad worked last year. Let’s just use it again.”
I’m talking about that Subway meatball pepperoni melt ad with the gondolier and the Reese’s ads (although more so the Subway one). C’mon, guys, what the hell?
At what point did it become OK to just recycle the same ads year after year? Those are the only two I could remember, but I know other companies do this. These companies don’t even have the pride in their own product to say, “Nah, guys, we can’t do that. C’mon, we can think of something new.”
Why didn’t they rock the boat? Why do exactly the same thing over and over again when you could try something new and maybe come out of it with a great ad campaign?
Related tangentially to my overarching theme is the seeming need by some people (I don’t know who, but they’re there) to wipe out everything beautiful in this world. You guys remember the Wild Iris mural? Key word: remember.
They painted over the Wild Iris mural. With orange. No, not a cool picture of an orange smoking a doobie or something. Just solid orange. And they painted over the mural by the bridge on 13th. With beige. Beige.
Who thought to themselves, “You know, I hate art and love solid, boring colors. How can I let the world know?”
Our generation is locked in a struggle.
A struggle with those who want conformity over vibrant difference. People who don’t like the boat to be rocked.
Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture, alluded to this struggle. She describes the purveyors of an “official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege” and says, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” There is no way we can defeat the hegemony of the static culture of conformity without rocking the boat, without testing the limits. There are people who will criticize us for stepping outside the bounds they have created and continue to uphold.
For them, conforming to a monolithic monoculture is a duty, and they will attempt to ostracize anyone who breaks it.
But for us, rocking the boat is a duty. We must continue to push against everything that tries to convince us that different is bad. If we don’t, the bad guys win!
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column runs on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
