Ah, spring. Love is in the air. Specifically, two kinds of love are in the air: self-love and the love for others. What’s that, you say? Self-love is a bad thing? Goodness, you’re right! In that case, we’d better take pains to ensure that everyone on campus knows how selfish they are and how selfless we are. But how in the world are we going to do that? Well, after much contemplation, I think I’ve found a solution.
Step one is to do a little bit of introspection and make sure you’re actually one of the selfless few. Don’t worry, it should only take a second or two. Simply take stock of both your recent and planned activities and see if any of them could be construed as altruistic. Seriously, it could be anything. You went to UM last week? Bam, selfless. You’re thinking about participating in a service project overseas? Super selfless. Hell, you could have put a Bible verse in your Facebook status three days ago and you’d be fine. Trust me, as long as you can think of something that makes you obviously better than other people, you’re in the clear.
Great. Now that we’ve got that down, let’s move on to step two. Step two is even easier than step one — just look around and see if you can notice anything about other people that makes them selfish. No really, anything. Did they opt out of church on Sunday to write a paper instead? Selfish. Did they tacitly endorse the ungodly slaughter of innocent creatures by ordering a hamburger in the cafeteria? Definitely selfish. Do they just look a little selfish to you, even if you don’t know anything else about them? Selfish through and through. See? It’s easy! Awesome.
Now that we’ve completed steps one and two, we’ve almost grabbed the prize. Don’t get too comfortable though, because step three is the most important. It’s not enough to know that God loves you more than the person next to you — that person needs to know this, too. Of course, telling them to their face would be rude (not that it would matter — their defensiveness would only show how their own petty self-interest has corrupted their minds beyond the hope of rescue). But for the sake of social politeness, let’s investigate our other options.
One way you can go is to use every social networking site at your disposal to announce your kinship with the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Another is to simply wait until a friend of yours makes a typically selfish comment (like, for example, “My depression has kept me from eating for days”), and then immediately jump in by stating your intentions to end world hunger by visiting Uganda for two weeks, or by reminding them that their problems are “like, so totally ‘first-world.’”
Of course, it’s possible that both we and the selfish many are only trying to cover-up for our secret knowledge that neither of us is actually willing to take Jesus’ example of lifelong poverty and self-denial seriously. But I don’t like thinking about that, so it can’t be true. And with that unpalatable issue safely under our belts, the only other reasonable alternative becomes perfectly clear and self-evidently true: sacrificial do-gooders like you and me are just plain worth more than normal people.
If skeptics need any more evidence of this, just check Facebook; our status updates will confirm it. Why, just last week I posted a status update letting everyone know that I plan to donate both of my kidneys to an orphanage in West Africa. Oh, and afterward I’m going to bring my dialysis machine to Latin America with me, where I’ll be teaching poor Brazilian children how to read and write in English.
Feel guilty yet? You should. If you were like me, you’d forgo your Western consumerist technologies in order to help save the planet. Unless you’re already uber selfless, that is — in which case, using your $1,200 Macbook Pro to log onto Facebook and tell everyone how saintly you are is totally OK.
