If you listen to any of Roy Zimmerman’s brilliant political satire (YouTube him), you’ll have heard of this lyric: “America is a Japanese fiddler / in Branson, Missouri / doing Louie Armstrong.”

That one line says a lot to me about this campus. It is more than a description of our diversity. It is a description of the ridiculous juxtapositions present in daily Stanford life. The examples go on and on: the ugly roaring head of Meyer is located next to the elegant Quad. Our police enforce local bike laws but often turn a blind eye to drinking laws, except if we bike while intoxicated. Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the Hoover Institution are members of our otherwise liberal faculty. We use Axess, yet we invented Google. We are diverse, but not when it comes to our computer science majors’ genders — or the Kappa Sig chat list. Premeds seem to always cut each other’s throats. Bike thefts and the honor code coexist (we don’t cheat, but we won’t give up stealing?). A church defines the center of our decidedly secular campus. Many of us have sunny dispositions despite difficult issues of depression and procrastination.

Could we be weirder? That is to say, could we be more American?

When I went home from campus for the first time, I was under the opposite impression, still under the trance of the all-important Stanford bubble created in my first quarter here. So, just to show everyone how just how entitled and privileged I was as a college student, I made sure that I carried at least one Stanford article everywhere I went in my little Ohio suburb. At the airport, my Stanford sweatshirt was on top of a Red Zone t-shirt, complete with bright red Stanford sweatpants. Whenever it was raining, I flashed my Stanford umbrella from the car for the world to see. I looked like a Cardinal logo everywhere I went. I realize only now, as I write this, how irritating I must have been to my friends and family.

Although not all of you have gone to my lengths to emphasize your Stanford-ness to an apathetic populace, I have brushed up against this psychological concept of entitlement in my peers here. So, readers, let us pop the bubble for a second. Let us realize that all of us convert ADP to ATP and then back. All of us put our pants on one foot at a time. In summary, everybody poops.

It is better for us to assume that our places as Stanford students are really like the places of every other college student. Although this assumption may not be totally true, it empowers us to let go of the opposite: an ill-conceived isolation from the world around us. Realizing that our future is inextricably linked with that of our peers forces us to work and think on larger spheres of political and social action, making a real difference beyond the Stanford community.

We may be the cream of the crop, but still, we are mostly made of high-fructose corn syrup like every other American college student. We are all hapless individuals, just with a few more Olympic- and Nobel-worthy aspirations, continually confused by the whole question of what it means to be a real man or woman in today’s society. Our place and fate, like the rest of America, is to fail and succeed over and over again until, as Kipling so famously wrote, we can treat both those imposters just the same.

So, fellow readers, I implore you: look around, further than the walls of the Quad. Do work in your time here that has direct impact on a society larger than your school. Make an effort to embrace the high-fructose corn syrup similarities within all of us — and let go of the rest.

To find out exactly how to break a bubble with corn syrup, send Aaditya a comment at [email protected].