As the forum for soundbites expands and the forum for epics shrinks, our ability to address--much less resolve--inconsistencies between the soundbites also disappears. Students say sweatshops mistreat the workers, companies say they don't--how is this meaningful without further information? If students provide more information and the factories refuse to reciprocate--effectively refusing to fight the war on anything but a soundbite level--how can we fail to recognize this itself as the problem?

How do we maintain internal consistency that stretches across sections, columns, classes, personal space? I don't mean to sound schizophrenic; there is a certain inherent duplicity in human nature, which can also be called sensitivity or culture, which dictates that the way you break the news of your Ec grade to your parents, your roommates, your siblings and your drinking buddies (or whether you do) is not the same. But in a world where all is judged in snapshots--where consistency is not valued except as a "next" button--fitting the story together takes some work of our own.

So here's to the first 800 words of the Constitutional Amendments and beyond. and change "it" to "they" in next sentence. The "it" after that is also they, but the third stays 'it' (refers to leisured self-reflection) May they grow, flourish, prosper. May they facilitate dialogue, as well as leisured self-reflection, in all its frames, between commercial breaks. Here's to the continuity of discourse and a life well and honestly lived, to the eight hundred and first word, to the fifty sixth-and-a-half and to the ten thousandth, and to all that goes unsaid.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House.