The D.C. metropolitan area has notoriously bad traffic that I hadn’t anticipated, so I was late to lunch with Viktor Maco ’06, his girlfriend, and their daughter. We ate delicious Indian food, and then took a stroll to a nearby café. We sat down and drank multiple cups of coffee each while my dog, Rufus, barked at passersby.
I think when you’re on the outside, even after Antioch, you can go back into the real world and become disillusioned again, but there’s a moment while you’re learning all these things where you see how massive and possible it is to make change—and then Antioch really started to click into place for me. Because if you think about it, it’s set up perfectly—especially if you want to introduce radical change, if you want to really implement your ideas. At Antioch obviously you study for a semester, or two semesters, and then everybody breaks apart and they go out on their co-op and they learn whatever they learn about, and then you come back. And that’s the magic thing. You come back and you have the ability to share all this information, and go back and do it again. If we were a little bit more disciplined and a little bit more organized, you know, you could really take advantage of that constant going out into the world, not just your state, but different cities in the United States, different countries. It’s amazing because just that kind of loose structure of leaving, learning, and coming back and sharing and then doing it again… the possibility and the momentum that you can get doing that is pretty incredible. The downside to it is that we’re always very fractured at Antioch. There’s so many different little groups within the subgroups within the subgroups with whatever they’re passionate about. The unity is in that we’re all opposing something; we’re all fighting something, but the lack of unity is all our own little agendas. I hope that something they’re trying to instill in people now is to really bring their co-op home. Even if it’s a crappy experience, being in corporate, you know… having to Xerox stuff and get people coffee, you’re at least exposed to what those people’s lives are like.
