As you may or may not know, I graduated in December after the longest and shortest three and a half years of my life. As my time at UC Berkeley comes to an end, so does my position with the California Patriot. I’ve enjoyed my time assisting with this student publication, and I know that my successors will be able to pick up where I left off on both the magazine and this blog. So I’d just like to leave you guys with a few random closing thoughts…

Politics is the most unsatisfying of interests. Much better to be happily obsessed with sports or celebrity gossip than face the inevitable disillusionment of a political junkie. It’s like a game you can never win. Sure, your political party can “win”, and “win” big, but you need to sell your soul and become a partisan hack to really enjoy these victories. To see all of these smiling faces celebrating the GOP in 2004 or the Dems in 2006 is pretty mind boggling. Your favorite team didn’t just win the Super Bowl, your favorite celebrity didn’t just release a sex tape, so what’s there to be excited about? Your party defeating the “other” party so they can push things you really don’t believe in and give lip service to the things you really do? Because that’s what has happened before and that’s what will happen again. Do any of you actually want to admit that you actually approve of what one or the other of the two parties are doing in practice? If so, either reexamine your beliefs or, more likely, take a closer look at what your politicians are doing. I hate politics. If only it weren’t so interesting…

Do something. Besides academic stuff. Yeah, academic stuff is important and I wish I had spent more time on it, but a lot of other things go on at school too. Get involved with groups on campus or start your own. The experience will probably come in handy later on. My obsession with politics lead me to the Patriot for all these years. Even though I disagreed with much of what was printed, I personally got something out of it and I’m happy to have helped our countless writers and artists get something out of it too by getting them published each month.

Tolerance, please. If there’s one thing you should really learn from Berkeley, it’s to cherish individual diversity and look beyond what seems obvious. In less enlightened times and places, diversity can be the scapegoat for hatred. Hating others simply because of their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, political orientation, social class, and so on. Instead, why not choose to like others because of shared tastes or compatible personalities? The things that actually matter in defining ourselves as individuals. And the only way to really know an individual is to put your prejudices aside and find out. The reality is, there’s six billion of us and we’re all minorities of one. Why is this such a radical viewpoint?

So that’s about it. I regret not posting more these past few months; I could never get back into the habit. I hope my libertarian rants weren’t too tiring and that they weren’t too out of place with the rest of the Patriot. I hope someday they’ll be the norm… Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone who actually read the crap I posted for the last few years. Maybe I’ll find a new blogging outlet, once the withdrawal kicks in…

It’s been fun.