This month’s topic is on judgment and its use. Judgment, in particular, is required when growing up in a culture that constantly preaches not to judge while choosing to uphold the activities of the lowest common denominator, namely school dances.

I don’t know if every school has dances like the one I am going to discuss, whether public or private, but I would be curious to know, so feel free to share with me. This was certainly the climate when I was attending my public middle and high schools in New York and then in New Jersey. The first actual nightclub that I went to was in D.C. while in college, and it was clearly the inspiration for such school dances when I was growing up.

My first school dance was in the sixth grade when I would have been at the tender age of eleven. At eleven, I walked into a gym that was dark, loud, and downright frightening. I had never seen such a place before. The music was blaring, so much so that I covered my ears to protect them. Girls were behaving strangely around me and telling me that I was dressed up wrong. Guys were doused in horrible-smelling cologne and gel spiked all the hair they had on their body at that point. Teachers looked the other way while boys met girls up close and personally; I had never seen “grinding” before. The lights from the DJ disoriented me as I turned around looking for the familiar faces that I knew in the daylight, the faces I sat beside every day in the classroom. Where were they, or what, exactly, had they become in an instant?

***

Each year, I went to the next homecoming dance, believing that somehow a new grade meant more mature peers. Boy, was I wrong. It took me until I was seventeen years old and had worked my way up the high school food chain before I wrote this piece (even though I regrettably never sent it in). 

Our Nightclub Dances Must GO!

I have gotten into Peer Leadership and Teen PEP and these leadership roles have made me question how our school could better represent itself. My inspiration for change came from our Homecoming dance and several middle school dances beforehand. I believe that our dances are inappropriate and do not represent this school or any other school well. If you have ever been to a dance you would see kids ‘grinding’ in almost complete darkness while supposedly ‘dancing’ to extremely loud pop/rap music that no one can actually dance to. These dances begin in middle school and promote, to put it bluntly, sex. The music is also extremely loud as stated before, which can harm a student’s eardrums. I remember my eardrums buzzing for hours after I got home from dances. All I have to say is where has our culture gone? Our principals (and not just at LHS & LMS) seem to have ‘given up’ on enforcing school appropriate dances. I can understand that school officials feel that this is what most teenagers like and they’ll complain if you take away their freedom of expression but this should not be tolerated. I know many of my peers who would like their dances to be 80’s movie-esque. I know teachers who refuse to chaperone anymore because they feel uncomfortable allowing the kids to act in this way. If students learned how to dance then I believe that more of them would come and enjoy the dances. Learning how to dance is a great thing that our generation is missing out on. We are missing the whole point of what a dance is: a place to socialize and show off our moves not a place to sweat like pigs in the dark and dry hump to bad, booming noise. Excuse the vulgarity but I really do believe strongly in this. Kids are missing out on a great cultural past time.

I have never had fun at any of the dances I have been to which means that something just isn’t right. I’m not saying that students must stand a foot apart and sway to 50’s music, but I do think that we have toppled over to the other extreme. We are a SCHOOL, not a nightclub. I also realize that many teens like pop/rap, however, it seems one-sided and unfair to the students who like other kinds of music. The DJ’s should have a variety of music in order to expand students’ horizons and, as a result, teens can learn to respect other kinds of music. We could have jazz, R&B, swing, blues, classic rock, classical, anything! Just being exposed to different dances could also benefit the students because dancing is great exercise and so much fun. Learning dance steps from other countries could also become a culture experience (which International Alliance has already shown us). We could have break dancing, waltz, jitterbug, swing, and tango, whatever you can think of.

This is what dances everywhere have succumbed to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6t_rdl5zNg&feature=related  (This is a typical dance: crowded, blasting music, grinding, swaying like a dunce or jumping like one…I’m getting nauseous just watching this. Plus those are just 8^th graders!!! What are we teaching them?! We are undoing all of the endless hours of abstinence messages just by allowing these types of dances to occur every month in LMS)!

Here is my vision. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-OG0EyJyV8&ab_channel=BoxofficeMovieScenes (Please notice the comments at the bottom. Just clean fun).

Now that’s a HUGE difference and it has only been 26 years since 1985! Clearly something is wrong and we have culturally demolished ourselves.

My plan, (if you and the school officials think it’s possible), would be to get a petition signed by a numerous amount of students to change our dance system, possibly after talking to the Board of Education, and create an experimental dance hosted by a school club/several clubs where high school students could come, dance, and then vote on whether or not they’d like to change our old dance habits. Then, if enough students enjoy it the school could change every dance to this new system. I know the question has popped into your head about how exactly we will teach around 300 high school students to dance…but this is what I am thinking. I would like to add dancing to our physical education program. So along with the required weight room and swimming units we should also have another in dancing. I still haven’t quite figured out if we could pay for a teacher, (I do know of a great ballroom dancing couple who work very close to LHS), or we could just buy dance videos to play on the TV in the aerobics room. After learning a few new moves hopefully the enthusiasm for real dancing will return and we can all live happily ever after… Thank you for listening and please get back to me about whether or not this is even possible.

***

I was eighteen when I wrote this next piece for one of my first college literature classes.

The Atheist’s Sermon

How silly you look. How young. You’re not a real college student. Simultaneously attempting to calm my nerves and get ready for the party, I slip into my elegant dress and shoes. This was the only “clubbing” attire that I owned. Trying to escape the nerves wrapping themselves around my brain like thin vines, I stealthily step out of my room and into the residence hallways. My heart is starting to palpitate hard against my chest as I scurry down the hallway and out into the starless night to join a group of four other girls who were all wearing “little black dresses.” Staring down at my own purple bubble dress, I withdrew from an instant realization that I was already screwing up that night.

Doubly self-conscious, I step onto the shuttle bus full of half-naked students. Egotistical boys are talking in the back, while the leader of the pack makes his presence known for all capable of hearing by saying that he is “semi-hard right now.” I feel my face burn and I force myself to breathe again. I cannot help feeling naked, dirty, and mysterious all at once. I am trapped in a completely packed shuttle with these other crazy party-goers. And in the midst of such chaos, a girl is putting on ten pounds of cherry red lipstick on her already obnoxiously bleeding-red lips. While girls with the flat-ironed bleach blonde hair, the extra padded push-up bras, the arrogant walk – you know, the hip-swinging, back straightened, nose-to-the-sky type of walk are strutting around the bus stop waiting for their dates. This shuttle of hormones begins to move after five eternally long minutes. I sit and try to make small-talk with the people accompanying me, but I can’t help getting distracted by the darkness outside that is enclosing the bus. It is around 10 PM now, so the night is still relatively young. We exit the shuttle and before I know it, I am on the metro headed toward Metro Center, our destination for the evening. The metro lights are unnaturally bright for this time of day. They sting my retinas. I look away and catch a glimpse of my right wrist clenched onto a cold, metallic rod for support. My wrist looks so small that I almost do not recognize it. It appears vulnerable, pale, innocent, thin, delicate, and fragile – breakable. And I swear it was getting smaller as the night dragged on.

The chill weather gives me goose-bumps as I walk down the road immersed in warm, illuminating street-lights. I can sense the buzz humming in the silent air, this is the nightlife. People line up on the escalator, one after another, all headed somewhere. Some faces were disapproving and it made me feel like an outright scoundrel. Other faces were absorbed in their own thoughts – hollow, and unchanging. Still some were happy as clams, laughing like fools, already having a good time. I am none of these people. I am a nervous wreck. Having been to several parties previously, I usually ended up awkwardly dancing with my friends out of a sense of obligation and then I would proceed to sit out for the rest of the night. The whole “club culture” which has always been a major attraction for students has constantly felt like the antithesis of my very being, but I could never effectively explain why to people. Homecomings, formals, and prom always ended the same way for me – lonely. I went out that night to understand myself. What was I psychologically struggling with every time I went to a party?  Was it just me or was it something else more powerful than myself coercing me not to enjoy it? Am I in the wrong or are others? 

It is an hour long line. Even with our “Ladies Night Passes,” we still have to wait with everyone else in the bitterly cool night air. A whirl of smoke and perfume fill my lungs as I wait there in line choking on its consistency. Greasy-looking men smoke at least three cigarettes during that long wait, while slutty-looking women complain about the line. Meanwhile, the heels and skin tight clothes on every body type imaginable were being unwillingly downloaded into my subconscious mind. Those images sear my eyes, while the electrical neurons shoot up into my memory center, and my innocence is quickly vaporized from existence. French speaking people behind me in line speak of how they pity me and how “saintly” I look among my friends. Is it really that obvious? Finally, I make it up to the door: boorish guards check my bag and driver’s license, take my umbrella away, seize my money and pass, grab my miniscule wrists and mark and stamp them to death. I want to run away but I keep walking forward, determined to discover once and for all why I feel this way. I enter the club and it is all fog and strobe lights. One puff of smoke after the next, an unrelenting chain of stupor enshrouds the club. It is loud and cramped, I cannot breathe. My group and I push through the crowd so that one of my friends who have been here before can show us each floor. I shove my body through the crowd, men flinging themselves at me. I push more forcefully now, the adrenaline rushing through my entire body. A room full of Ids. A room full of escapists. A room full of imperfection.

It is around 11 PM and we spend the first twenty minutes running up and down narrow staircases. Constantly passing by a bright blue and green light box which was the only beacon of stability I had to cling to amidst unstable waters, because it soon became a familiar sight. Bodies are shoving their way upstairs or downstairs in such commotion. It is as if people had suddenly become mindless ants crawling to and fro on their tiny hill without rhyme or reason. And the staircases are black so it is almost impossible to see where you are going, except for the various colored lights escaping from the floor below. It is like some kind of twisted nightmare that I have had before. The first floor is the main floor which has mostly pop music, the next floor is rap, and the final floor (at least from what I can remember) is Hispanic music. We visit all three and decide to stay awhile on the third floor. So standing in a circle we sway back and forth to the music, no one looking happy or having fun. One of the girls I do not know is “grinding” with a random man who looks to be about twenty-five years old. We all stare. It is not dancing, it is dry humping. Excuse me for being so blunt, but this is what I saw. And in order to understand oneself, the truth must be told. After that I was through, finished, done. Yet again, I experience the party for five minutes and then give up on hoping that I will have a good time. I have hoped one too many times. It’s useless. I hate it.

 Looking back now my family was never very religious, but I was brought up a Protestant anyway. When I first realized that I could think for myself, I never thought much about god. But that all changed when my mother died. I can still remember a kid in my class saying, “maybe you didn’t pray hard enough for her.” From that point on, I hated any notion of a god. Having never really believed in him in the first place, it was easy to reject him entirely. But for this reason I am not Agnostic, because I resent people believing in some creature who could kill my own mother so viciously. No just god could do something as evil as that and get away with it. So having kicked god to the curb, I looked to people and nature. My expectations for myself and others rose to unnatural heights. My definition of perfect was no longer connected to some omnipotent presence, but to other human beings. It is not difficult to be perfect in my book. One must simply maintain moral goodness and care for oneself. I do not see people as walking shards of soul, as many others do. I see people as whole, good, and always striving to be better. That is perfection.

It is about 1 AM when I begin amusing myself by watching how drunken people are based on how poorly they walked up the stairs. It began with people joyously dancing up the stairs, then people began spilling their drinks halfway up, then men and women began zigzagging up the stairs, some people tripped, and angry women yelled at the security guards. These were signs of the night growing older, and yet the music continued to get louder, as if to shout in rebellion against time aging. And as the music was increasing in volume, each note was nailing a sign into my skull which said, NEVER AGAIN. Finally, at 2:45 AM, my friends were finished partying and I could leave this foreign place. The stark, early morning air slapped me hard in the face. One of the girls said she felt nauseous and had to sit down, another girl did not look like she had any fun at all, the one who invited me claimed that she had fun, and the “grinding” girl I had only seen for five minutes before she ditched us was staring up hazy-eyed into the pitch-black sky. Apparently, an older guy brought her a couple of shots to take and she had willingly accepted. While keeping an eye on her, we flagged down a taxi which drove us back to campus (we managed to shove five bodies into one cab). And of course, I had to pay the taxi driver. What a waste of twenty dollars. By 4 AM, I quickly run to the bathroom, throw off my elegant dress and shoes, and yank on my pajamas. Then, I proceed to scrub the marker and stamp off my hands and wrists until they are bright red. I wish I could forget this night in its entirety. I crawl underneath my thin fleece covers and allow the night to settle in my brain and produce the answer to my problem. The images that bore a hole in my memory kept playing in my head over-and-over again, until I reached some pretty hefty conclusions about myself and others. 

I am not in the wrong. My body and soul are simply intertwined – inseparable components of my being. My mother’s death allowed me to see that the two must be connected in order for me to find happiness. And the only way that I can combine the two dual entities is to find other people with the same high moral expectations. My own morality shines through because, as Socrates says in Plato’s Socrates and Alcibiades, “either […] man is nothing, or, if man is something, he turns out to be nothing other than soul” (48).  I am soul. I am soul, because I have decided to devote myself to people. So by using my body, I can carry out my soul’s will. Without a god to lead me through life, I must rely on my own intuition. For I am limited to people – all I know are other people. Socrates also says in Plato’s Five Dialogues, “that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness” (78). Hence, my very being is made up of other people. And if the soul is reused like water, then I have a well-versed soul telling me that clubbing is wrong.

People often tell me that I place too much moral weight on things like alcohol, drugs, and parties. But if I give way to these evils, then what does that say about my soul? I prefer to be hyper-sensitive and in control of my senses at all times, because that way I can take pleasure in the simple joys of life. I can combine soul and body to achieve happiness. I do not wish to escape from reality. I wish to relish in it, because being an Atheist I believe that this life is the only one I have. Therefore, I can only respect and have fun with the people who can earn my respect. People must work for my love and I must work for theirs. I shall never compromise my body and soul for others, because I have taken on perfection. I am perfect. Call me a saint, an innocent little girl, an old soul, but I will not be peer-pressured into corrupting myself in any way. I love humanity, and that night I was personally hurt and disappointed that people could behave so irrationally for fun. Escapism is not what I look for in other human beings, but courage…to have the courage to act, to live, to enjoy insignificant moments, to taste life twice.  I want to be able to look up to mankind, not despise it, because that is all that I have to live for – myself and other people.

***

After reading this essay, my freshman college professor told me I was “being way too judgmental of these people who were just trying to have fun.” She looked at me with hatred in her eyes. You see, the point of this introductory assignment (and many of the subsequent ones) at this liberal university was to “go outside of our comfort zones and learn something new about ourselves and others.” The main example pressed upon us was to pretend to be homeless for a day and then write about that. What this translated to was to be humble, you privileged child, and place the lowest in society above yourself—it was meant to be the ultimate act of altruism in order to enter the pearly gates of this university.

I was having none of it. After all, I was one of those students who had already struggled enough in life and chose not to go down the path of drugs, prostitution, crime, and homelessness. I didn’t work this hard just to end up there, anyway. I was using my senses and honestly felt sick going to what this culture was telling me was a place to have the time of my life. It wasn’t life; it was death.

I was meant to put my head down and serve death—in my college career and my future job until I was skin and bones myself. I was meant to shrivel up and die like Christ on the cross for others. I was worthless without the other. That’s what school was trying to teach me now, not reading, writing, or arithmetic.

In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand discusses “judgment” as something that we all must do to “evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard.” And that “[n]othing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.” Therefore, I judge so as to understand myself and the world clearly. And this sensitivity to the world makes it more sustainably pleasurable than being in a dark room that is too loud to even think in—not from a religious perspective but from a human, moral one.

The only ingredient missing in those gyms (although I’m sure the “bad kids” already had it) was alcohol and drugs. Those ingredients magically make that dark room “fun” for adults. The darkness and noise and hazy fog blinding the senses—the complete abandonment of reality—is fun? If that is truly fun, then that means something is not right in that person’s personal life. They are deliberately trying to escape reality. As I said before, it is an unsustainable and ugly way to live. As an adult now who cannot be bullied, I will not ignore how I always felt about these types of dances and how they reflect our culture at large. For any time you abandon reality, the risks to you of losing control for good increase. I choose life over death every single day and so should you, so judge on, my friends.

***

Links: https://www.amazon.com/Socrates-Alcibiades-Symposium-212c-223a-Philosophical/dp/1585100692; https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Dialogues-Euthyphro-Apology-Phaedo/dp/0915145227/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=; https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Selfishness-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0451163931

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.