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Life is cumulative. We all try and make sense of where we have been and what we have done. It’s a shame then that we are judged by where it is we currently stand…or maybe for many it is not such a shame. In this cultural context, it is not so much a measure of where we stand in relation to ourselves (in our personal cumulative process), but where we stand in relation to everyone else. This is something that has always been very difficult for me to contend with. I struggle every day not to let comparisons disable me.
For the culture essay (which I tried to write several times on three different topics), I wrote but did not turn in my essay entitled “Go to College!” In it I was expressing how credibility rests on having a college education; success in life is basically contingent upon having this college degree. Everyone knows that you can be successful without a degree, but this is more of a gamble. In the Social Darwinian sense, the fittest are the most educated and the most educated have degrees to prove their worth. I am not comfortable with this assessment, yet I am back in college for the third time after my degree…so I am enabling the disabling culture that I contend with.

“Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.”
- Walker Percy (in chapter one of The Last Gentleman)