When the entertainments of a long break run dry—"Hugo" seen (in 3-D), cookies baked (and eaten)—what is a liberal young woman to do to occupy herself for the rest of a five-week break? Download NPR podcasts, obviously, and catch up on back issues of The New Yorker.
It's a habitual pastime of mine, spending afternoons with densely descriptive articles even when their subject matter is far outdated. While abroad last school year, I read 12 back issues of The New Yorker from around 2008, courtesy of a fellow student, who decided it was worth it to pay a king's ransom for Sri Lankan delivery of the weekly magazine.
Last year, it may have been beside the point to read about an imminent battle between Barack Obama and John McCain two years after the fact, but a trifecta of articles I stumbled upon over winter break struck me as timelessly relevant to the United States, our search for justice, and our claims of egalitarianism.
In three recent editions of The New Yorker, I ploughed through the stories of teenager Dakotah Eliason's murder trial; the overpopulation of American prisons and the implementation of solitary confinement; and the ramifications of Tyler Clementi's 2010 suicide, allegedly prompted by the harassment he experienced at the hands of his college roommate, Dharun Ravi.
Moral of the story: the media is cunning and controls me, a lowly college columnist, like a puppet.
Joking aside, the articles were troubling, both because of the themes explored—rehabilitation (or lack thereof), the limitations of traditional notions of law and order, the (perhaps overly) punitive nature of the American legal system—and the resulting distance between the subject and the reader.
Reading pieces such as these can be akin to visiting a pavilion at the world's fair, or listening to an episode of "This American Life." The subjects are interesting, we recognize something of ourselves in them, despite the fact that there are ultimately metal bars, or radio waves, between us.
It is difficult, of course, to reconcile these two states. I am a passive observer of the events that occupy the entirety of Eliason's existence, for example, though I recognize the problems with incarcerating a young man for life because of a crime he committed at the age of 14.
I wrote about the inappropriateness of capital punishment in a fall 2009 issue of the Orient, and the incongruity of prison systems and the death penalty, particularly in the wake of Troy Davis' execution, haunts me still.
Anders Breivik, the man responsible for mass murder and terrorism in Oslo, resides in relative palatial comfort within the confines of a Norwegian prison, while two likely innocent men—Davis and Cameron Todd Willingham, whose case I discussed in the 2009 op-ed—died unceremoniously and unjustly. While logically it makes little sense to compare the legal systems of two very different nations, these cases are certainly illustrative of the inordinately cruel practice of capital punishment in the United States.
Call it liberal guilt if you want. Personally, I have no label or solution for the complexities I recognize in our country and from my privileged position as a Bowdoin student about to graduate.
As I look toward next year, and living in the "real world," however, I find myself searching even harder for something close to an answer.
Caitlin Hurwit is a member of the Class of 2012.