A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Evan Clark Having read the short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir and most of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I have noticed intriguing parallels and differences between their portrayals of the concepts of the individual versus the collective. My fellow seniors in the McConnell Scholars Program and I have been reading the Zamyatin’s dystopian novel throughout this semester. While the novel’s immensely unreliable narrator, D-503, begins to question the worldview propagated by the theoretically all-powerful One State, he nevertheless writes propaganda for the One State throughout much of the book, at one point describing the individual as insignificant compared to the collective. This perspective of the One State reveals the assumption that there is a dichotomy between the individual and the whole, and that the collective must triumph over the allegedly puny and expendable individual. On page 102 of We , D-503 writes, “On one side is the ‘I,’ on the other is the ‘We,’ the One State...

By Celia Cusick  Growing up, I was raised and encouraged to be independent. My headstrongness was a force to reckoned with from an early age. At 2, I decided and proclaimed “I do it myself” regarding dressing myself, which as my mom fondly recounts, led to a couple of mismatched ensembles. We all still laugh at that one. I was lucky enough to have parents that nurtured and encouraged this kind of independence because it taught me some invaluable lessons. It instilled within me grit and strength which are two lessons I am so thankful for having learned.  Recently, I have had the conversation with my mom about why she felt like this was so important for me to learn from a young age. She responded, “I felt like you needed to be stronger because life is harder on girls. I wanted you to be prepared.” At first, I felt a sort of irritation about how unfair it is and seemed-- a sort of righteous anger not at my mom, but at the world. How unfair it is that I had to wor...

By Jared Thomas I have never been at goodbyes, so I don’t intend to start saying them here. That comes next semester, so everyone continues to insist to me. The end, they say, is closing in. The barbarians are at the gate and they’re carrying pounds and pounds of LSAT prep books instead of clubs. They’re demanding sky-high application fees instead of gold, frankincense, and mer. They’re wreaking havoc on my shaky mental health, instead of my pristine city streets. The end truly is nigh and, for the first time in my life, it feels like it. This is new for me, in a whole host of complicated and a wider collection of painful ways. The fact of the matter is, to me, the end of my high school career was more like ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than ‘Return of the Jedi’ but this….This is ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and the end credits are in real danger of rolling before I’ve had a chance to wrap everything up in a way that’s going to keep the fans happy. A long time ago, in a galaxy far,...

Donald Stoker's Why America Loses War: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present  (Cambridge University Press, 2019) The United States has been at war since 2001 in various parts of the globe.  We have an entire generation of officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted military members who have known only war.   In addition, the majority of our law makers and now three presidents have also never served in a time of peace.   Given that we have been fighting the same conflict for over 18 years, one is correct to ask the question, do American’s know how to win a war? In his book, “Why America Loses Wars,” Dr. Donald Stoker, a former professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College’s Monterey Program, answers that question.   Stoker argues that Americans don’t know how to win.   Further–not only do they not know how to win, they don’t understand what war is all about.   Certainly these sen...